President

-By Eric Boehm, Watchdog.org

As the nation enters the third week of the Obamacare health exchange implementation, it’s worth taking a second look at some interesting comments made in August by one of the chief architects of the law.

In short, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., never really thought the exchanges would work.

He just sees the Affordable Care Act as the first step to a fully government-run health care system, something that could be easier to achieve after the glitch-riddled, problematic opening of the federal health insurance exchanges this month.

During an appearance on a Las Vegas PBS program in August, Reid said he sees a national single-payer health system as the natural next step for health care in America. Reid said the nation had to “work its way past” insurance-based health care, according to a recap provided by the Las Vegas Sun newspaper.

“What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever,” Reid said.

The so-called “single-payer system” essentially would do away with private health insurance and would allow the government to become the sole provider of medical costs (though all costs would actually be picked up by the taxpayers, of course), similar to the socialized medical systems in Canada, Great Britain and elsewhere. The benefits of a single-payer system, from the government’s point of view at least, is that it does away with one of those pesky Obamacare problems — having to get people to enroll in the exchanges through their own free will.

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Harry Reid: Obamacare first step to single-payer system”