Tea Party on Health Care

The Tea Party revolution was all about opposing ObamaCare

RICK SANTORUM: Well, it was the issue in 2010 that caused us to have the Tea Party revolution. It was all around the issue of health care. And this election is going to be all around the issue of health care. And they are two great elections for Republicans. 2012 was not about health care.

Q: Missed opportunity now getting back politically?

SANTORUM: You know, that's the area that really was my strength. I was the first person that introduced health savings accounts, and the Congress worked on Medicare and Medicaid reform when I was there. I felt like we had the opportunity to really focus on that: Look at what ObamaCare is really doing. It's driving up costs right now. I think you're going to see these numbers not be as encouraging as the administration has pointed out.

OpEd: ObamaCare & bailouts both just throw money at problem

People in South Carolina were outraged by what they were seeing in Washington. For the Tea Party and many others, ObamaCare was just one more in a long train of Washington abuses that had begun with the TARP bailout. I shared their outrage. Everything I had fought against in Columbia was happening in Washington, and, what's more, the taxpayers would soon be handed an outrageous bill for it. As far as I was concerned, the health-care law was a part of the same DC mentality that had given us the bailouts: Don't fix the problem, just throw it back on the taxpayers and have them pay for it.

Rise up against takeover of banks, cars, & health insurance

Only after the government seized control over our banks, our mortgages, our cars, our insurance, and took dead aim at controlling our health--our very lives--along with 1/6 of the entire US economy, while going into debt for more money than all of us produce in an entire year--only then did we rise up in the 2nd American Revolution: the modern-day Tea Party movement.

Replace ObamaCare with healthcare interstate compacts

Health care compacts themselves don't impose a one-size-fits-all approach on any state. They allow each individual state to choose what solution it believes is best for its citizens. Will some states implement systems that aren't compatible with the Tea Party movement's core values of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and constitutionally limited government? Of course. Are we okay with that? Absolutely. Power to the people.

The alternative is the very real prospect of the socialization of the nation's health-care system at a national level.

Tort reform needed to avoid costs of "Defensive Medicine"

ObamaCare was forced down our throats

We did not hear about how Obamacare is coming up short of what the President and his administration thought that it would. It was supposed to help bring down health care costs, it has not. It was supposed to help keep health insurance costs down, it did not. Hundreds and hundreds of companies are asking for waivers in order to be able to try to keep the health insurance plan that they have, because if they convert over to Obamacare, they won't be able to afford it, they may not be able to provide health insurance to their employees at all. Obamacare simply needs to be repealed because it was forced down our throats to begin with.

OpEd: Tea Party came from angry "No to ObamaCare!"

We all remember the congressional town-hall meetings I the summer of 2009 -those exuberant, colorful, sometimes even rowdy moments when the independent spirits of Americans erupted. "No to Obamacare!" they shouted. The mainstream media often tried to ignore those displays, but the new media were no bypassing the old-media blockade. You could see the shocked expressions on the face of liberal politicians as they were confronted by their own angry constituents.

Civil society is reasserting itself at the ballot