Warren Buffett Sours On ObamaCare:'We Need Something Else'

UPDATE: John Sexton noticed that the quotes being pulled from an article published last week about Buffett and Obamacare came from a March 1 Politico story. It appears that Buffett was opposing ObamaCare before it was passed.

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Famed investor and friend of Obama, Warren Buffett is now saying that we should scrap Obamacare and try something else.

“‘We have a health system that, in terms of costs, is really out of control,’ he said. ‘And if you take this line and you project what has been happening into the future, we will get less and less competitive. So we need something else.’

Buffett, who supported Obama through both elections, noted, ‘what we have now is untenable over time. That kind of a cost compared to the rest of the world is really like a tapeworm eating, you know, at our economic body.’

But he does not believe that a government run plan providing coverage for everyone is the way to go, now.

‘Attack the costs first, and then worry about expanding coverage,’ he said. ‘I would much rather see another plan that really attacks costs. And I think that’s what the American public wants to see. I mean, the American public is not behind this bill.’

Buffett is certainly correct about our health care costs compared to the rest of the world. Writer young adult fiction and YouTube vlogger, John Green explains the complicated reasons and why there’s no easy fix in this video:

The question of theyear, #Defund or #Delay? is being hashed out on blogs and Twitter with both sides making great points. Ace of Spades blogger DrewM and Red State’s Ben Howe are arguing to Defund ObamaCare now, and Ace of Spades blogger Gabriel Malor and NRO’s Avik Roy have taken the Delay side.

Posts to read:

Avik Roy, NRO: The ObamaCare Defeatists

Ben Howe, Red State: Opposing #DefundObamacare out of Fear

DrewM, Ace of Spades HQ: Delay Vs. Defund Fight Isn’t Just A Disagreement About Tactics, It’s About A Lack Of Trust

Gabriel Malor, Ace of Spades HQ: Obamacare Defunding Disarray

As I said – both sides make great points. I remain on the Defund it now side. Ben Howe’s arguments here in particular resonate with me:

Where opponents of Defund believe the strategy falls apart is when we must depend on Republicans to stand strong in the face of a PR nightmare. Basically “we’ll lose the fight but still get blamed and that will hit us hard in 2014.”

Well apologies again, but this may just be part of the process. It’s time to take our medicine, people. As I said on twitter yesterday, when we’ve reached the point where each election is so insurmountably important that we must defy our own principles in order to secure election to “survive to the next fight” then we may need to re-evaluate. This is the electoral equivalent of living paycheck to paycheck and, having lived that way before, I can assure you until you accept that there are going to be some consequences for how you got where you are, it’s only going to get worse. A PR nightmare can last years. But it will be far worse if you deal with it by curling into a fetal position.

There’s no doubt that the Obama machine can spin a fight into one direction and lay the blame at our feet. They might even be right in some ways. But throwing polls at this question misses the entire point of what it is that we’re supposed to be doing and what it is that I hopelessly dreamed we would have learned from our 2012 losses: it’s our job to convince people that we’re right.

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