Here are a few nuggets from the interview with Ben Sasse that Pete highlights below.
I think most Americans believe in a basic social safety net. But if there are 3–5 million hard-to-insure people right now, why are we disrupting the 165 million persons in an employer-sponsored insurance market?
. ..President Obama and the media are lying and you get away with talking about Obamacare as universal coverage, 47 million uninsured when we passed this, and on CBO calculations we’re on a pathway from 47 to 56 million uninsured. On the most recent CBO revisions, a minority of those 56 million are going to get insured under Obamacare. . . . But the media allows him to talk about it as universality.
I think we should have . . . a shared cultural or societal goal, of universal health insurance coverage. That’s completely different from saying the government can solve all of those problems . . . there are market-based solutions that would accomplish more, deal with the uninsurance problems more effectively . . . I think Medicaid harms people. . . . There’s not data that shows that the health care for people on Medicaid is any better for people who are uninsured . . . .
. . . the fact that the U.S. subsidizes R&D for the world. So there are many things that exist in the British system that are not as horrible as they would be if everybody had a single-payer system.
. . . Medicare Part D was fundamentally flawed because it wasn’t paid for. . . . Politicians of both parties love to spend other people’s money. . . . it’s obviously going to come to an end, it’s just a question of whether it comes to an end by leadership or by debt crisis.
Would you like some truth with your Whopper?
