Needless to say, Sarah Palin supports Ted Cruz’s nonsense attack on Obamacare. Meanwhile Steve Schmidt says he has “deep regret” for helping to create a “freak show” wing of the Republican Party for sicking Sarah Palin on the nation. Schmidt got it right:
“For the last couple of years, we’ve had this wing of the party running roughshod over the rest of the party. Tossing out terms like RINO, saying we’re going to purge, you know, the moderates out of the party,” Schmidt said. “We’ve lost five U.S. Senate seats over the last two election cycles. And fundamentally we need Republicans, whether they’re running for president, whether they’re in the leadership of the Congress, to stand up against a lot of this asininity.”
Sarah Palin’s ridiculous response:
“What Sen. Cruz is doing is waving [the U.S. flag] and he is saying, ‘Hey, what is the alternative here in fighting for our economic liberty in the United States of America?’” Palin said on “Your World” on Fox News. “What his colleagues, too many of them are doing, they’re waving [the white flag] and they’re saying, ‘Oh, let’s surrender until we win.’ That is their tactic? This is nonsense. More power to Sen. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, others who are standing up for what they campaigned upon, and that was to do whatever they can do, seize whatever tool that they have, in this case the tools are in the legislative branch, the purse strings, getting rid of the socialized health-care coverage policy of Barack Obama.”
Besides the fact that the effort is futile, and shutting down the government over this fight will probably harm the Republicans, she has her facts wrong about the Affordable Care Act. It is not socialized health-care coverage. Obamacare is the opposite of socialism. The Affordable Care Act promotes private health care coverage. In much of the country their is no market for health care coverage because one insurance company dominates the market. The Affordable Care Act creates a true market where consumers have a choice of competing health insurance companies.
The risk of socialized medicine comes from opposing ObamaCare. If recent trends had been allowed to continue, the individual market would have collapsed and a government-run program would have become far more likely to be developed as the only remaining way to provide health care coverage.