Botched Obamacare Rollout Is ‘Opportunity of a Lifetime,’ Bachmann Says
Rep. Michele Bachmann, R- Minn., is absolutely delighted by the troubled rollout of HealthCare.gov and President Barack Obama’s recent mea culpas.
Bachmann told reporters Tuesday that the rollout presented conservatives with the “opportunity of a lifetime” because “liberalism is crumbling in front of our eyes.”
The Minnesota Republican explained that as Americans are confronted with Obamacare’s failings, they’re going to naturally look to conservative, free market solutions.
“What we have is the fantasy thinking of what Obamacare was going to be versus reality,” she said at the monthly Conversations with Conservatives event at the Heritage Foundation.
Bachmann said that on Tuesday morning, when she was getting ready to come to the Capitol, she was listening to the online music service Pandora when an ad came on — “’cause I’m too cheap to pay the Pandora monthly fee” — for a Minnesota company selling a Skype doctor service.
“You’re so busy trying to bundle your kid up and get ’em to go to school, you don’t have time to go make a doctor appointment,” Bachmann said, celebrating the service as an innovative health solution.
“I think companies over the years are going to come along and they’re just going to offer what people want. That is the radical American model where we figure out our own better mouse trap,” Bachmann said.
Those sorts of free market solutions have Bachmann excited.
“I’m all for it,” she said, noting that while the government struggles with its health care website, “real Americans” are going to find solutions for people at a price they can afford. “And I think that’s the revolution that I think we’re going to see.”
Other Republicans at the event said that instead of trying to fix the problems of the health care law, Republicans should continue their as yet unsuccessful attempts to scrap it.
“There’s only one fix to Obamacare, and that’s to repeal it,” said Rep. Raúl R. Labrador of Idaho.
“You can throw a lot of money at the problem, and you’re still going to have a broken health care system. It’s going to be worse than what we had before Obamacare,” Labrador said. “So I think we repeal it and we start all over again. I think that’s the only solution that Republicans should be for.”
Labrador did note that there was a difference between addressing security issues with the website and dealing with the “real consequences of Obamacare,” a concern which Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky raised.
Massie, another participant in the conservative panel, said that “while this train wreck is happening, there is one thing we should try to work on, and that’s the security of the website.”
Massie noted, to a chorus of laughter, that “the best way to stay secure is to practice abstinence.”
“We have prophylactics,” Labrador quipped.