Matt Yglesias

Rep. Shadegg Warns of “Soviet-Style Gulag Health Care”

Not content with out of control Hitler analogies, Rep John Shadegg (R-AZ) took to the floor yesterday to demonstrate that he’s a fool. Lee Fang has the quotes:

SHADEGG: You know, it occurs to me, and I’ll go through these other scandals very quickly, but what we’re really getting here is we’re not just getting single-payer care. We’re getting full on Russian gulag, Soviet-style gulag health care [...] It appeared in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal. You can Google it. You can pick up the phone and call Kim Strassel. You can ask her about Soviet-style gulag health care in America, where powerful politicians protect their constituents.

Lee reminds us that “The Soviet gulags were a network of prisons and forced labor camps that held as many as 20 million people during Stalin’s reign of terror.” To compare a set of insurance regulations you happen not to favor to Stalin’s mass imprisonment and slaughter is ridiculous, and absurdly insensitive to the real victims.

Massive human rights violations aside, I would also note that health care was among the strong points of the Soviet economy, along with primary and secondary education, armaments, and mass transit.