Joining a long line of Democrats distancing themselves from Obamacare, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel hinted that he didn’t support the President’s original plans for the healthcare take over and advised the President to take a different approach, though he shied from saying just what that meant.
In a March 27 interview on cable business network CNBC, Emanuel claimed that he offered the President a “contrary opinion” on Obamacare but his advice was not heeded.
“He asked for my opinion,” Emanuel said during an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “I gave it to him and why I thought we should do something slightly different.”
Emanuel, who was President Obama’s chief of staff during the 2008-09 debate over Obamacare, refused to elaborate on just what his plan would have looked like. Instead he fell into rote praise of Obama and his healthcare scheme.
“The president, to his credit, he was not scared to have contrary opinions. He, constantly during tough moments in passing that bill, asked me for my opinion, unvarnished,” Emanuel said.
But in an interview from December of 2013, Rahm’s brother, Ezekiel–Obama’s chief healthcare advisor–noted that his brother wanted something more “incremental.”
“He thought we should have done something more incremental, that doing something comprehensive is not in the nature of the American health care system, and I thought doing something more comprehensive was absolutely essential to actually fixing the health care system,” Zeke Emanuel told USA Today.
Clearly, Rahm Emanuel thought that the massive Obamacare bill was a mistake but it seems he isn’t willing to own up to the truth just yet.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com
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