May 6th, 2009:

via Cantor Tries, Fails To Offer GOP Health Care Plan On Morning Joe (VIDEO).

On Morning Joe, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA7) Minority Whip was asked by Carlos Watson if he favored a compromise with the White House on a major issue such as health care. Mike Barnicle has follow-on questions:

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA7) Minority Whip

MIKE BARNICLE: You just raised the issue of health care. We live in the only civilized nation in the world, where if … your child gets sick with a really terrible illness, you might find yourself in bankruptcy court in order to pay the bills. So, without the pretty language, without the big words, can you tell me: what’s your health plan, what’s it going to cost, how are you going to get it done, how can you work with the Democrats in concocting … in coming up with a health plan that works for everyone?

CANTOR: First of all, let me just go in here and address the assumption here in the discussion. We also have a health care system industry that, in reality, if you are sick anywhere in this world and [if] you can afford it insurance, you can come here for your care insurance claims because we do have access to the best care insurance, but you’re right, there are too many people who don’t have access to that care insurance, so what we need to do is to be able to address — number one — the coverage and access to insurance, and number two, to be able to demonstrate that we can bring down cost [to the insurance industry]. Now this notion that we are somehow going to allow the government to take over providing the care insurance because that’s going to address the cost factor [due to competition], is just a false start. You can’t assume that this place in Washington [, the Health and Human Services Department that manages Medicare and Social Security] is going to do things [as] efficiently [as Medicare]. What we do know is that we need to promote the ability for people to — number one — if they lose their job, they don’t necessarily lose their health care insurance — number two — if they are sick and they have a pre-existing condition, we must allow for them to access affordable coverage [insurance], because that’s a huge issue right now, how people can access coverage [insurance] when they are sick, and that has to do with expanding the risk pools [of insurance], giving people the ability to access much more affordable coverage [insurance]. Right now, we are so tied to a third-party payer system [of insurance] that, you know, people are at a whim cut off from access to care their insurance. so we’ve got to go back to centering our focus on patient/doctor relationships [and insurance payments from HMO bureaucrats].

Every strike-through and [meaning] are all mine.