Today, U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) appeared on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. The following are excerpts from the discussion on today’s program:
Watch the video of Senator DeMint’s interview here
On Democrat health care promises, and Republican principles of real reform:
DEMINT: “Well, they gave a similar numbers with the stimulus and promised our unemployment wouldn’t go above 8 percent. And now in South Carolina, it’s over 12. So the numbers are hard to trust, George. This is not personal against the president. I like the president, but he is out of control and he has been leading a stampede of more spending and debt and taxes and government takeovers. He has taken a bad economy and made it worse. He used a lot of false promises and bogus numbers and panic to push through the stimulus. And the promises have not panned out. And now he’s trying to use the same strategy on health care. And what I’m trying to do and I think even Kent has had reservations, let’s slow down and get this right. My goal is to protect the right of every American to make their own health care decisions. And if we can do that, we can come up with a bill.”
“Republicans want to protect the right of Americans to make their own health care decisions, to pick their own doctors and their own plans. We can do that and… we could have a plan in a few weeks, George, if the goal is not a government takeover. We’ve never seen the government operate a plan of any kind effectively and at the budgets we talked about. This is about the most personal service that Americans have. We don’t want to put a bureaucrat — as the president talked about the other night, he was talking about taking a red plan, a red pill or a blue pill. He was accusing doctors of taking out children’s tonsils just to make a profit. He doesn’t have the right respect for doctors and how the industry works.”
via United States Senator – Jim DeMint.