VIDEO: Rep. Schakowsky (D-IL) exposes liberal motivations behind healthcare “reform”

This truly is one of the more shocking videos I’ve seen on liberal “healthcare advocates” in Congress admitting the real purpose behind their “healthcare reform” agenda:

Here’s a partial transcript:

“I know many of you here today are single payer advocates and so am I … and those of us who are pushing for a public health insurance don’t disagree with this goal. This is not a principled fight. This is a fight about strategy for getting there and I believe we will,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) told a group of government-run health care supporters on April 18.

… but make sure to watch the whole video. It’s not long, and she gets right to the point. Listen to the crowd cheer, and to how animated she gets as she ridicules the private healthcare industry and admits the truth behind liberal efforts to “reform” healthcare. The word that struck me was “unprincipled.” She’s basically admitting that the fight for a socialized healthcare option now being waged by liberals is a sham.

Of course, this is not news to those of us who have known and argued for years that this was the true agenda of the left when it came to restructuring and reforming healthcare as we know it by moving it from a mostly private enterprise to being run by the government. But to have it so blatantly admitted on camera is a rare thing indeed.

Then-state Senator Obama once strongly advocated single payer healthcare in 2003:

Transcript:

I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, is spending 14 percent, 14 percent, of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody…A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I would like to see. As all of us know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, we have to take back the House.

I should note that he was wishy washy (of course) on the issue while running for president, not advocating for a mandate on single payer … just yet:

Obama’s health-care plan aims for universal coverage by offering a new government-run marketplace where Americans could buy insurance, mostly from private plans. He would offer subsidies to individuals and to small business owners that offer their workers coverage. His plan also would require that parents get insurance for their kids. And he aims to lower health-care costs to make coverage more affordable. His plan includes one small step toward single payer. His new marketplace would create a new government-run plan, like Medicare, to compete against the private plans.

But Obama repeated that he rejects an immediate shift to a single-payer system. “Given that a lot of people work for insurance companies, a lot of people work for HMOs. You’ve got a whole system of institutions that have been set up,” he said at a roundtable discussion with women Monday morning after a voter asked, “Why not single payer?”

“People don’t have time to wait,” Obama said. “They need relief now. So my attitude is let’s build up the system we got, let’s make it more efficient, we may be over time—as we make the system more efficient and everybody’s covered—decide that there are other ways for us to provide care more effectively.”

Uh huh.

The Heritage blog outlines the liberal strategy:

Recent SCHIP expansion and additional Medicaid funding in the stimulus package made a substantial down payment on major expansion of government run health programs. Established research shows that a public health plan will ”crowd out” private insurance, forcing millions of Americans off their current plans, and away from their family doctors. A public health plan, coupled with Comparative Effectiveness Research, would engineer artificially lower prices for medical services through the imposition of Medicare-style price controls. Such Medicare-style payment levels would undercut the market share of existing private health plans, and, combined with a mandate on employers, stack the incentives against workers in private employer-based health insurance by encouraging their employers to dump them into a new government-run health plan. Watch the video of Rep. Schakowksy’s statements on The Foundry. She clearly admits that the purpose of the government run option is to kill private insurance so everyone eventually is forced into government-run health care.

Sounds like President Obama learned very well from his Secretary of State.

(Hat tip: ST reader ES)