Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO), the likely Republican nominee in this swing state’s top-tier 2010 Senate race, made a very interesting statement about health care reform: Suggesting that government should never have gotten involved in health care through Medicare and Medicaid back in the 1960s — and possibly blaming those programs for the problems we have today.
“Well, you could certainly argue that government should have never have gotten in the health care business, and that might have been the best argument of all, to figure out how people could have had more access to a competitive marketplace,” Blunt said during a radio interview. “Government did get into the health care business in a big way in 1965 with Medicare, and later with Medicaid, and government already distorts the marketplace.”
“A government competitor would drive all the other competitors away,” he explained. “What we should be doing is creating more competition. One of the reasons the marketplace doesn’t work the way it should work right now is we really don’t have the competitive marketplace that I’d like to see put in place.”
