RGF president quoted in Sen. Ted Cruz’s floor speech on ObamaCare

When Texas Sen. Ted Cruz took to the floor of the Senate in opposition to ObamaCare, he had lots of air time to fill. This provided an opportunity for him to call attention to some of ObamaCare’s opponents around the nation. This included a quote from Paul Gessing, president of the Rio Grande Foundation. You can find the quote in the Congressional Record, but it is this: “ObamaCare locks in the worst aspects of American health care. Rather than restoring the patient-doctor relationship, it puts the IRS and the Federal Government alongside insurance companies between patients and their doctors.”

Curiously enough, our own dear columnist Winthrop Quigley of the Albuquerque Journal defended ObamaCare in a recent column. Quigley apparently believes that conservatives and free market advocates should be happy about the law because it “rescues the nation’s for-profit health-care financing system.” Notice that Quigley doesn’t say “free market.” Perhaps we’re getting through to him on that front.

Not surprisingly, I disagree with Quigley on his assessment. ObamaCare doesn’t “rescue” our health care system. Rather, by burdening the remnants of what was once a relatively free market system with further regulations, the law is moving us further down the path to a single-payer system. Harry Reid gets this.

As I explain in my quote above, ObamaCare embraces the very worst aspects of our existing system by inserting new parties — mostly government bureaucrats — between doctors and their patients. That is the point of ObamaCare and that is why conservatives at the Club for Growth are opposed to it.