Senate Majority Leader Reid: #ObamaCare will lead to single payer system

The ugly truths about this monstrosity of an unnecessary bill continue to gush out – especially now that it’s all but inevitable all of the provisions of it will take effect as of next year. Via the Las Vegas Sun (hat tip):

In just about seven weeks, people will be able to start buying Obamacare-approved insurance plans through the new health care exchanges.

But already, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is predicting those plans, and the whole system of distributing them, will eventually be moot.

Reid said he thinks the country has to “work our way past” insurance-based health care during a Friday night appearance on Vegas PBS’ program “Nevada Week in Review.”

“What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever,” Reid said.

When then asked by panelist Steve Sebelius whether he meant ultimately the country would have to have a health care system that abandoned insurance as the means of accessing it, Reid said: “Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.”

The idea of introducing a single-payer national health care system to the United States, or even just a public option, sent lawmakers into a tizzy back in 2009, when Reid was negotiating the health care bill.

“We had a real good run at the public option … don’t think we didn’t have a tremendous number of people who wanted a single-payer system,” Reid said on the PBS program, recalling how then-Sen. Joe Lieberman’s opposition to the idea of a public option made them abandon the notion and start from scratch.

Eventually, Reid decided the public option was unworkable.

“We had to get a majority of votes,” Reid said. “In fact, we had to get a little extra in the Senate, we have to get 60.”

Reid cited the post-WWII auto industry labor negotiations that made employer-backed health insurance the norm, remarking that “we’ve never been able to work our way out of that” before predicting that Congress would someday end the insurance-based health care system.

If any of you are surprised by this candid admission from Reid, don’t be. Any number of Democrats came out on record well before the bill was passed that their eventual goal was a single payer system, including Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL)in 2009 and then-IL state senator Barack Obama in 2003.  Obama then went on later to lie about his intentions regarding the single payer system during the Democrat campaign for President against his main rival Hillary Clinton, revealing a serial disregard for the truth that would later (and still continue to) play out after he was elected President.  On the issue of health insurance coverage in particular, Obama and his party – eager to expand the size and scope of the federal government because they believed the people themselves were just too stupid to make coverage decisions for themselves – perpetuated a number of falsehoods about this bill prior to its forced passage through Congress, like the whopper about being able to keep your own doctor and stay on your own plan, etc.

The ultimate lies, however, were the left’s assertions that the implementation of ObamaCare wouldn’t fundamentally change the dynamics of health insurance coverage as we know it, outside of the ability of more people to get “affordable coverage.”  The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack gets to the heart of the matter:

And so we have a rare moment of bipartisan agreement in the United States Senate. Reid now appears to concur with Republican senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who has has been warning for quite some time that Obamacare was “rigged to fail” in order to pave  the way for a total government takeover of the health insurance industry.

Yep.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi once said about ObamaCare that the bill had to be “passed” so we would know what was in it, but the truth of the matter was that it didn’t need to pass before we knew the true, ultimate intentions of its strongest proponents. All we needed to do was to listen to the words that came out of their own mouths.  This is how Democrats operate in the grand scheme of things: Propose government “solutions” to problems best solved by the private sector, and then sit back and watch as a growing number of people begin to oppose those “solutions” once the truth about them starts to be revealed, and once it becomes obvious that the “solutions” aren’t only making the problem worse (like the Great Society programs of the 60s, for example).  Then the same Democrats propose “reforms” to those “solutions”, which in essence takes the cat of the bag:  The so-called “solutions” were never designed to work in the first place.  They were designed to grow government and your dependence on it, and increase the power of the staunchest advocates of said programs and “reforms” by allowing them to play “hero.”  When will people ever learn?