Ben Carson Confronted by Roland Martin on Obama
October 19, 2013 | Posted by
Roland Martin Confronts Ben Carson
After conservative darling Dr. Ben Carson made his head-shaking comments that Obamacare was “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery,” Roland Martin got a chance to confront him on Martin’s NewsOne radio show yesterday.
Noting that atrocities like Jim Crow arose after slavery, Martin asked him, “Did you go too far?”
“That’s my opinion,” Carson responded. “First of all, I recognize that slavery was a horrible thing … I realize how horrible it was … I didn’t say this is as bad as slavery, I said this is the worst thing since slavery.”
“Which includes Jim Crow,” Martin interrupted.
“Yes, absolutely,” the neurosurgeon and author said. “This nation was founded on the principle that it would be a new type of nation, that was for, of, and by the people. A constitution was put in place that would assure that the people remain at the pinnacle of power and that the central government would never reach the point where it had control of the people. [Obamacare] fundamentally changes the relationship.”
Carson said the Affordable Care Act will give the government control over “everyone’s health,” to which Martin responded by saying it empowers the individual.
Carson said the law gets in between the patient-provider relationship.
“This is only the beginning,” Carson continued. “What you will see is that a lot of the insurance companies will begin to fold … Ultimately, we will have a single-payer system if we don’t stop this from happening.”
Obamacare Opponents Bring Their Fight to the States
The effort to derail Obamacare, having failed in Congress, has now moved to the states, where well-funded groups are pressuring local lawmakers to resist the expansion of Medicaid — a major part of the law’s efforts to cover 48 million uninsured Americans.
In Virginia, Emmett W. Hanger Jr., a Republican state senator from the deeply conservative Shenandoah Valley, is feeling heat from the Republican right, specifically from groups like Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy group backed by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch.
Hanger told the New York Times the group is waging “an attempt to intimidate me” in Richmond and at home by phoning his constituents, distributing leaflets and knocking on 2,000 doors in his rural district.
“This has been one of those trench warfare kind of efforts for a year now, and I think it is one of those hidden stories of the whole fight against Obamacare,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity. “It’s not flashy; it’s just in a whole bunch of state capitals and in the districts of a whole lot of state legislators, but it’s such a crucial aspect of the overall long-term effort to roll back Obamacare.”
The expansion
of Medicaid, a joint federal-state program for the poor, is critical to
the law’s goal of covering the nation’s 48 million uninsured. Hospitals
and insurers are counting on more Medicaid patients to make the
economics of the law work. The federal government would pay 100 percent
of the cost of new enrollees for the first three years and 90 percent
after that.
But in June 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that
states could opt out of Medicaid expansion, which opened the door for
conservative opponents of the law to use Medicaid as an arena to oppose
it. Americans for Prosperity has paid staff members in 34 states and is
running aggressive campaigns in states like Arkansas, Florida, Ohio,
Louisiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Tea Party Patriots recently gave $20,000 to
organizers of a referendum drive to put the question of Medicaid
expansion on the Arizona ballot.
So far, roughly
half the states are moving forward with Medicaid expansion and an
increasing number of Republican governors are expressing interest.
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