Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) today explained his health care flip-flop, saying of the health care bill that “even though it’s got a lot of good things,” even “a lot of things that I wrote,” in the end “the bad outweighs the good.”
Yesterday, Grassley’s staff sent out an e-mail to reporters taking credit for many of the provisions in the health care bill and playing up his own role in bringing it about — despite repeatedly speaking out about against it.
Today on MSNBC, he kept up his flip-flopping, pointing out that “there’s a lot of things in this bill that I’d been working on as an individual senator,” like “the sunshine provision so we have more transparency of the relationships between doctors and pharmaceutical companies.”
Grassley continued: “These are all things that there’s a consensus we ought to be doing it, this is a vehicle to get them done, but those being in there does not overcome the fact that this increases taxes,” among other things.
He added: “So overall even though it’s got a lot of good things in it, even a lot of things that I wrote, even a lot of things that I thought up myself to help health care delivery, the bad outweighs the good, it’s just that simple.”
Simple, eh?
Host Andrea Mitchell also asked him about the individual mandate, something currently being challenged on constitutional grounds, but which Grassley himself helped conceive in 1993 during the Clinton Administration.
Grassley explained: “If it was unconstitutional today, it was unconstitutional in 1993, but I don’t think anybody gave it much thought” back then.
He also commented on the recent threats against Congressmen who voted for the bill: “That is not what should be going on in America.”
Watch:
