Obamacare makes it "illegal" to purchase inexpensive insurance policies that allow consumers to pay lower costs for policies that have high premiums, and it is "insensitive" for the White House and Democrats to tell Americans to "take it or leave it," Sen. Rand Paul said Thursday.
"I think it's kind of insensitive of the Obamacare people to say, 'Oh, well, prices are going up. These are just one of those things,'" the Kentucky Republican told Fox News' "America's Newsroom."
Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber told CNN on Wednesday the law is working as designed and there is "no sense in which it needs to be fixed," but it could work better if there was a "larger mandate penalty" that would not allow people to wait until they get sick before they get insurance, RealClearPolitics reported.
However, Paul said the real problem is Obamacare's marketplaces are not truly open ones that allow insurance companies to sell just any insurance policy.
"The one thing about Obamacare that's not mentioned enough is that Obamacare actually makes it illegal to sell inexpensive insurance," Paul, who is a ophthalmologic surgeon, told Fox News' Bill Hemmer.
"The insurance I had 10 years ago, where I had a high deductible and a low premium, I can't buy that anymore because [President Barack] Obama won't let me. He decided that he knows better than all the consumers in the country. It is insensitive to say 'take it or leave it.'"
With the law's architects saying it was their intention for prices to go up, "we have to be worried about the people in charge," Paul continued.
He noted in his home state and in Tennessee, there are people seeing a 65-percent increase in prices, and "this is what happens when the government gets involved."
"What my concern about the interview yesterday from one of the architects is he's also saying, 'Well, they need to go all in,'" Paul said.
Paul said in his state, Kentuckians are unhappy with both President Barack Obama and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for many reasons already, mainly over the war on farms.
"You add into the mix the regulatory war on hospitals, doctors and the price of insurance –very, very unhappy," Paul said.
And that makes GOP nominee Donald Trump an attractive candidate, he continued.
"If you get away from all the nonsense that's been involved in the presidential election, Trump is a help," Paul said. "Trump is against regulatory war on coal, on banks, family farms, hospitals, Obamacare and that is popular in Kentucky and in a lot of states. If we could stick to those issues, I think he could do very well.
"Basically what Hillary Clinton represents is 30 years of stale policies and heading in the direction of socialism and over-regulation and bankruptcy and debt, and if we stick to the issues, and we get rid of personality excesses, I think that you would actually get to a point where Trump has a very viable chance of winning."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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