GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann spoke this afternoon to about 300 employees at Nationwide Insurance in Des Moines, and she rapped both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney for supporting a health insurance mandate.
Bachmann said President Obama’s health care reform law will have “terrible effects on the fabric of our nation,” but she specifically talked about the individual mandate as “beginning to do great harm to the United States’ economy.”
Bachmann’s hit at Newt & Mitt:
“This is just for point of clarity. I’m not here to speak ill of any of the candidates in the race, but just for the sake of the history of this issue I’m telling you this, in 1993, another Republican, Newt Gingrich, got behind this idea of forcing all Americans to buy health insurance and he said, ‘I am for people having health insurance and being required to have health insurance.’ That’s what the struggled was back in 1993. The American people were so upset about this, they made a decision they didn’t want socialized medicine which was what was being proposed and it was rejected.
“…Even as recently as May of this year Newt Gingrich also said that he believed all Americans should be forced to have to purchase a health insurance policy. We need to look very clearly at what this means for all of us. We’ve seen the model play out already. We’ve seen it played out in Massachusetts where Mitt Romney was the governor. They put this system in place. What did this mean? The system in Massachusetts meant that health insurance policies went up dramatically for the people in Massachusetts. In fact, a new survey that was released by the Massachusetts Medical Society revealed that fewer than half of the state’s primary care practices today accept new patients. It’s down from 70 percent in 2007 before the mandate for health care came into effect. This is what we need to know. It isn’t as though we were blind, not knowing what these policies would mean in the future. We had Massachusetts to look at…The average wait time now in Massachusetts for a routine check up with an internist is 48 days…and it takes 41 days now to see an OB/GYN. This is something that we need to think about very clearly, about who will be the person to actually get rid of ObamaCare.
“When I was in Washington watching this coming down the pike, I knew what this was going to mean for America. I knew that it was going to mean a spike in increased costs and I knew it was going to mean a diminution in the quality in the amount of health care that would be available to the American people and that’s what we’ve seen already.”
About O.Kay Henderson
Kay is a founding member of the Radio Iowa network newsroom. In 1994, she became the network’s news director. She’s a featured reporter and commentator on Iowa Public Television’s “Iowa Press,” and the 2002 recipient of the Shelley Award.
Yes many of these aftershocks exist and it will take some time to absorb the occasional inconvenience and necessity for better planning. The program isn’t all about making things more comfortable for the well off. It’s about making health care available to everybody and removing the burden of payment for all uninsured from the government. Does she realize that all citizens and even non citizens are treated equally regardless of ability to pay ? It’s when the bill comes due that the government is forced to pick up the tab for the uninsured. And by the way Ms Bachman that’s pretty expensive.
Some visualization insurance plans, like further forms of insurance, would let you choose the level of exposure that you want. The better the treatment, the higher the cost is.