While Democrats fussed with the details of health care reforms, conservatives spent months telling the nation that the real issue is freedom, that what's on the line is American liberty itself.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I don't know if there is a Democrat who necessarily doesn't believe health care is a right instead of privilege. There is a significant between us and the Republican Party on that issue.
Every time I hear a Republican talking about health care reform, they say the American people don't want it. They say it so much that I think they're beginning to try to convince themselves that it's true.
Yes, Democrats can prove that America pays more for health care than other countries; yes, they have won the dispute that private health insurance is needlessly expensive. But what they've lost is the argument that we are a society.
What is at stake in the debate over health care is more than the mere crafting of policy. The issue is now the identity of the Democratic Party.
You have to understand the way the liberal looks at something working. Their purpose here is not to provide you health care cheaply, affordably and plentifully. That's not what this is about to them.
When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, Sarah Palin tweeted, 'Obama lies; freedom dies.' She's referring, I guess, to the freedom to go without health care when you're sick.
While the Left seems obsessed with increasing taxes and spending even more money, conservatives have focused more heavily on the need for spending restraint and entitlement reform - primarily to preserve and protect the future of the Medicare program. Overlooked in all of this is the future of Medicaid.
There are a lot of Democrats that tell me that they are just distressed over what Obama has done to the health care industry and to jobs. They are afraid to say anything about it because of recriminations, because this regime fights back.
Freedom is the one value conservatives place above all others, yet time and again, their ideal of freedom ignores the growing imbalance of power in our society that's eroding the freedoms of most people.
The Obamacare contraception mandate was never about freedom. It was always about pitting secularism against religion, and using the power of government to sponsor secularism.