Politico Reports Obama Video Declaring Support of Single-Payer/Government Takeover of Health Care

This is old, old news for most of us, but it's good that The Politico is finally reporting on it.

Maybe someone else will pick up the story, since they're not the vast rightwing conspiracy and their reportage doesn't need to be boycotted.

It’s one of the most persistent — and potent — Republican arguments against health reform: that President Barack Obama and fellow Democrats want a U.S. government takeover of health care.

And what evidence do they have to back it up?

Obama said so. Just check out YouTube.

“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer, universal health care plan,” then-U.S. Senate candidate Obama said at an AFL-CIO event in 2003, using the terms that commonly refer to a government-run health insurance system.

“Everybody in, nobody out, a single-payer health care plan, universal health care plan — that’s what I’d like to see,” he said. “But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately, because first we’ve got to take back the White House. And we got to take back the Senate, and we got to take back the House.”

...

[C]ritics of Obama-style reform have been able to exploit the mixed messages to sow doubts about Obama’s true intent in pushing a trillion-dollar overhaul of the health care system — with powerful evidence, captured on videotape, to back up their claims.

...

You don’t have to go back to 2003 to find leading Democrats supporting a so-called single-payer health system. The most damaging examples are from this year.

And then they recount Barney Frank and Jan Schadowsky stating that public option would lead to single payer. ObamaCare supporters easily explain such statements -- Frank isn't telling the truth.

He's lying? Um, okay. He does have good authority on his side (unmentioned by The Politico) -- the guy who invented and then sold the public option to liberals says it's not even a Trojan Horse because it's "right there" (i.e., it's not a Trojan Horse, as its purpose isn't even hidden as the Trojan Horse's was; it's too obviously engineered to be a pathway to single-payer to be a Trojan Horse).

Hopefully, some network besides Fox will bother doing their job now and reporting on this.

Of course... They seem to have waited until Obama had all but abandoned the public option to mention it, eh?

Thanks to AHFF Geoff.

posted by Ace at 12:13 PM

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