Toomey for Senate

Interview with Pat Toomey
Rightosphere.com
Posted: 3/2/2010

By Kavon Nikrad

Kavon Nikrad: Is it a little bit surreal to likely be facing Mr. Specter as your Democratic opponent in the general election this November?

Pat Toomey: Well, you know, I think it’s very early to try to judge who my opponent is going to be. I think Joe Sestak has a very real chance of defeating Arlen Specter in the Democratic primary.

But, I acknowledge, it could go either way and yeah, it would be a pretty major reversal to be facing Arlen Specter as a Democrat especially after he so adamantly stated he would never leave the Republican party only to take one look at a poll that showed he couldn’t win a primary and then, promptly, did exactly that what he said he wouldn’t. But you know, the substance of his, the very liberal record of his career in politics, his siding with big government and bailouts and staggering spending, unacceptable deficits, I mean, all those things, he’s been guilty of for a long time. So it really won’t change the contrast in this race.

Nikrad: What are the short-term and long-term consequences to the American economy if the fiscal insanity that has gripped Washington continues?

Toomey: Well, in the short term, I think it impedes the rapid kind of recovery that we would normally expect after a dramatic recession.

I’m not a believer in the Keynesian interpretation, if you will, that some in Washington think that you can simply borrow and spend your way to prosperity and if the government borrows and spends enough, everything will be fine. I think that is patently ridiculous. This is a huge misallocation of capital. It might in some areas create a temporary illusion of some economic activity but, in the short run, it actually impedes our growth, and in the long run, the effect is much worse.

In the long run at some point, we’re going to pay a very, very dear price for the staggering, unaffordable amount of debt that they’re creating. It could manifest itself in different ways; it’s always hard to predict how this kind of irresponsibility catches up. It could be with skyrocketing interest rates that make it prohibitively expensive for people to buy a home and then finance it with a conventional mortgage, or to afford a car payment on a car loan, it could wane small businesses’ ability to grow because they won’t have access to capital. In addition, or perhaps, instead, we could have a huge bout of inflation, which is one of my greatest worries, if the federal government decides to essentially modify this debt, to just basically to print the money with which to pay a bank, that flood of dollars that would be inappropriately created in that context would almost certainly lead to very dramatic inflation and, of course, that wipes out people’s savings. People who played by the rules, and worked hard, and put some money away, they would see the value of that savings dramatically diminished, if not destroyed, so I think there are serious both short-term and long-term consequences associated with this incredibly irresponsible spending.

Nikrad: Regarding healthcare, how do we improve access, hold down costs, and still preserve the quality of our system without rationing or raising taxes?

Toomey: Well, I think fundamentally we do it by putting people in control of their own health care, giving patients the power to be the consumers, to be the first person that gets to make decisions about their own health care and we have a system that does not do such a good job at that and we have a government that wants to really dramatically diminish individual and personal control over health care in favor of giving the government control over health care.

So, for instance, some of the things we can and ought to do that will help improve affordability and access: I think we should give individuals the same tax deductibility when they go out and buy health insurance that businesses get. That would make health care more affordable to the millions of Americans who have to buy it on their own if they were able to deduct the cost. It would also encourage individual ownership, which diminishes some of the other problems we have with our current arrangement such as the worry that people would be denied coverage based on preexisting conditions. That problem arises because most Americans don’t own their own health insurance, their employer owns it. And if they lose their job, or leave their job, well, that insurance doesn’t travel with them and they’re now subject to real challenges obtaining new insurance. Well, if people had their own insurance and it were renewable as it currently is under current federal law, then we wouldn’t have that problem.

An additional measure that I think would be very, very constructive is to force the insurance companies to compete for our business. I mean, it’s amazing to me that we can buy car insurance from a little green lizard, but you can’t buy health insurance from someone from Ohio if you live in Pennsylvania. It’s ridiculous. And if we force the insurance companies to compete for our business, how would they that do that? They would do it by being more responsive. They would compete on price, they would compete on service, they would compete on all of the things that any other insurer competes on in other aspects of our economy.

Ultimately, I would say some tort reform needs to be part of this mix, as well. That would not only diminish the direct cost of a very onerous legal system and the insurance that people have to pay, health care specialists have to pay, but also it would diminish the defensive mechanism that contributes to a lot of the cost—unproductively--to health care.

So all of these things would help improve access, they improve affordability, they would give patients more control over their health care rather than less, it wouldn’t jeopardize a single American’s existing health coverage and it wouldn’t cost the federal government billions or trillions of dollars. This is the kind of thing that we ought to be doing.

Nikrad: How to do you feel the people of Pennsylvania will react, the voters of Pennsylvania, will react if Democrats ram through their health care reform by reconciliation?

Toomey: I think people will be livid. You know, it’s really unambiguous that the American people have made clear their opposition to this gigantic, enormously expensive, unaffordable stack of mandates, and taxes, and new bureaucracy. The American people have made it clear every way they can. I mean, it spawned the whole Tea Party movement. It generated thousands of people standing in line to get inside town hall meetings to express their opposition. It showed up in elections in Virginia, and New Jersey, across Pennsylvania and in Massachusetts.

I mean, if the Democrats willfully decide that they are going to ignore and absolutely repudiate the wishes of the American people and jam this through despite the overwhelming opposition, I think they will pay a huge price and rightly so. This will be a real miscarriage of the responsibilities of elected representatives of the people if they do this and the people of Pennsylvania will not just take this sitting down. They’re already angry about this, they’re very engaged, they are paying attention, they know what’s going on, and boy, I tell you, there’ll be quite a reaction if the Democrats jam this through.