DENVER—No political experience? No problem, said retired neurosurgeon and 2016 Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson.
The GOP hopeful warmed up the crowd at the Western Conservative Summit by making light of his lack of political experience and playing up his Washington outsider status.
“The professional politicians say you can’t do it because you’re not a politician. I say I can do it because I’m not a politician,” Carson said, adding with a laugh, “nor do I ever want to be one.”
After Thursday’s Supreme Court decision upholding Obamacare, the former chief pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins said government health care will hurt the medical industry.
“The thing that embodies that most is the so-called Affordable Care Act, because here you have the government saying ‘we don’t care what you people think. We’re going to cram this down your throat and if you don’t like it too bad,'” he said. It’s time for the people to take the government back.”
Carson proposed his own plan to reform health care, using health savings accounts. Each person would have their own account, and each family would act like a private insurance group, he said. He explained that the government’s only role would be to set up the accounts and keep track of them.
The plan would attempt to move third parties out of the relationship between the healthcare provider and the patient, so there is no middle man.
Carson also presented plans to help the economy and fix the constantly growing debt, which he stated would affect generations to come. His plan includes a six-month hiatus on corporate taxes as a form of fiscal stimulus. He proposed that 10 percent of it would be used to create jobs for the unemployed and people on welfare
Just ten days days after Charleston shooting, Carson reaffirmed his support of the Second Amendment, stating that the right to bear arms is essential for the people to protect themselves from the government.
“The Charleston attack has nothing to do with guns being accessible, it has to do with people having evil in their hearts,” Carson said.
Later he added, “We have to spend a lot more time helping people to grow up in the right way, and not in a hateful environment, because believe me when people grow up like that, they will find a way to do it. Restricting guns is not the way to stop it.”
