McDermott: Obamacare Outrage Part of Plot 'All Fabricated to Destroy the Safety Net'

A member of the House Progressive Caucus blamed insurance companies for canceled plans and rate hikes as they try to comply with new Obamacare regulations.

Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) hailed Obamacare as “the furthest that we’ve gotten in developing a social safety net for Americans.”

“We have unemployment insurance. We have Social Security, we have welfare programs of people who don’t have money, and now, we’re going to get a healthcare system for everybody, we’ve had one for senior citizens and for children. And the Republican establishment, the Tea Party people are bound and determined to drive us back. And they are starting with healthcare and they’re trying Social Security and they’re trying on Medicare, they simply do not want Americans to have a safety net of security,” he continued on MSNBC.

“They want them to have always to be anxious so they’ll be glad to work and keep working for minimum wage jobs and they will never have to pay many pension or anything else. That’s the whole goal of this operation. Obamacare is just one piece of it; it’s the most prominent piece of it.”

McDermott charged that “people can’t tell the difference during Fox News and the insurance companies.”

“They’re both telling lies about what’s happening. The president did not take health insurance away from them, said you could keep it if the insurance companies kept the program the same, but the insurance companies want to make more money. So they cancel the policies, raise the prices, give a few whistles and bells, and say this is what we now have. It is all fabricated to destroy the safety net,” he said.

Still, he conceded that “one of the problems here is that the insurance companies have not only had to upgrade the bad policies but they have canceled the good policies they had in the individual market and they left a lot of people in the individual market in worse sort of shape than they were before.”

“They have used this as an opening to drive a mack truck through it and have really destroy the individual market again. We’re going to be faced with this problem as we put this thing together because the insurance companies want as much money out of a stone as they can get. They’re squeezing it as hard as they can and the middle class is paying the price. It is really reprehensible what they have done in this period as we’ve rolled into the enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act.”