Today, Representative John Shadegg (R-AZ) took bad faith to a new level, claiming he supports single-payer in a discussion with David Shuster on MSNBC:
"The reality is, this bill is going to reward for-profit insurance companies that have done a disservice," Shadegg said. "This bill is going to give them exactly what they wanted. The insurance industry, the for-profit insurance industry, wanted an individual mandate and that's what they're getting out of this bill. The for-profit insurance industry did not want a public option because they don't like competition and guess what? They're getting that."
Then, after some back and forth with Shuster: "I would support single-payer."
"You would support a government-run medical system?" Shuster asked.
"Absolutely," Shadegg said. "I would support forcing American insurance companies to compete. Right now they have a monopoly.
Yeah. Which is why, last May, Shadegg attacked government run health insurance, the public option, and single-payer:
But Obama is pushing a public plan that he claims will somehow co-exist with private insurance. Shadegg isn't buying it.
"Ultimately, that so-called public plan, or government plan, will run the private sector out of business, because the guys that are operating the public plan are setting the rules for the guys running the private plan," Shadegg says.
The congressman says Obama does not want people to think he will replace private health insurance. That's because of Democrats' bitter experience with the plan pushed by Hillary Clinton when her husband was president.
"I think Hillary figured out after the fact that when she proposed to dramatically change the healthcare system in America at a time when most Americans were relatively happy with their healthcare, she scared people," Shadegg says. "She wanted the same thing that Obama wants, but she was more forthright in proposing it, saying look, we need to go to a single-payer system. And she lost the fight."(...)
"The question is, through what mechanism do you deliver health insurance?" Shadegg says. "Do you put them in a government-run program that forces everybody into a one-size-fits-all kind of cookie cutter system and is run by the government and therefore not subject to the rules of competition, or alternatively, do you facilitate every American being in a system driven by choice, one that produces competition to hold down costs and drive up quality?"
And then, top up the ante, in October Shadegg described single-payer as the step before a Soviet-style gulag:
You know, it occurs to me, and I'll go through these other scandals very quickly, but what we're really getting here is we're not just getting single-payer care. We're getting full on Russian gulag, Soviet-style gulag health care.
So yeah, I believe Shadegg is being honest here. He isn't just cynically parroting left-wing complaints about the bill or anything. He really supports single-payer.
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