South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint says he has “turned up the rhetoric intentionally” in the health care debate with the Obama White House because “it’s the 11th hour as far as trying to stop this stampede for bigger and bigger government.”
In an interview with the Washington Examiner this morning, DeMint charged that the Obama administration is poised to make a mistake with its health care proposal on an even larger scale than the $787 billion economic stimulus bill. “Just as he said he misread the economy with his stimulus plan — and that’s a huge mistake, to spend a trillion dollars and then say maybe you didn’t have the economy right — he doesn’t understand health care, either,” DeMint said. (Earlier this month, Vice President Joe Biden told ABC that, “The truth is, we and everyone else misread the economy…there was a misreading of just how bad an economy we inherited.”)
DeMint, under fire from the White House for his statement that the health care debate could become Obama’s “Waterloo,” accused the administration of trying to make the health care debate a personal fight. “He doesn’t want a debate on this,” DeMint said of the president. “He doesn’t want us to read these plans. He doesn’t want the American people to know what he’s actually doing, so he’s going to try to distract attention from the policy by coming after me.”
“But I’m the least of his problems,” DeMint continued. “He’s got millions of Americans who are going to speak more loudly then I do. Those Americans are speaking to the Democrats, and a lot of them are beginning to get cold feet.”
DeMint traced the growing skepticism about the president’s plan, evident in a number of new polls, to the rushed passage of the stimulus plan in February. “It’s becoming clear they misunderstood the economy,” DeMint said. “Now, there’s another trillion-dollar bill with the same strategy of passing it before people even have a chance to read it and know what’s in it. But people are less trusting now.”
Before entering politics, DeMint ran a business with between 10 and 20 employees in which he handled his workers’ health insurance coverage. (“I didn’t have a human resources manager,” DeMint says.) DeMint called on his experience to propose what he calls the Health Care Freedom Plan, which he says would make it much easier for people who don’t have insurance through their jobs to buy coverage. “It’s a pretty simple bill,” he says, “compared to the thousands of pages we have now.”
DeMint urged the Senate against passing a health care proposal before the August recess. “Our hope is we can take these bills that we’ve got, well over 1,000 pages, put them on the Internet and let people see what’s really in them over the August break,” DeMint said.
