Barbieri on health exchange: ‘It’s socialism’

Idaho Rep. Vito Barbieri declared, “This health care mandate is not good for the nation. It’s socialism. … A socialist America is a broken America.” Speaking on a panel about a proposed state health insurance exchange at the AP Legislative Preview today, Barbieri said, “It’s a fundamental ideological principle: Can bureaucracy help deliver health care, let alone set costs?” He said he thinks it can’t. “A bureaucracy will, as it grows, propose more rules, more regulations, they will use the rules of course to increase their power over time and they will devour competition, which is what a bureaucracy does,” Barbieri declared. “Rules and regulations are the means of achieving these goals, and it will be used - that’s what a bureaucracy does.”

Barbieri called the idea of a state health insurance exchange “vacuous” and said the feds will still dictate everything. “A bureaucratic takeover of the health care system, and Idaho is running full-on into its arms,” he said. “Allow the private sector to deal with it.”