Flashback-McAuliffe on Universal Healthcare: 'It's Coming. It's the Right Thing to Do.'

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden made no mention of the Obamacare exchanges in their campaign speeches for Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe. Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli has been pounding away at the issue for last few days of the campaign. 

McAuliffe, who campaigned on the expansion of Medicaid across Virginia, was always a huge supporter of President Obama’s agenda for universal health care, in fact. Below is a video from a 2008 Fairfax County Democratic Committee meeting at Oakton High School. McAuliffe was the featured speaker in July of that year, and he discussed Obama’s and his own support of universal health care. 

2:01 – I think healthcare is the number one issue that we have today domestically in the country.  I went to 50 states. I did eight or ten events a day–there wasn’t a place where someone wasn’t talking about healthcare. They don’t have it. They can’t get the treatment. You know it. You’re in the field, so you understand it. We’re going to totally revamp health care. So what I think most people are excited about is we’re going to have major health care reform in this country come 2000 [sic] and we have to do it quickly. We’re gonna have to do it in the first Congress. 

We can’t wait on it. Barack is going to have to come rolling out–obviously on the economic package. He’s gonna have to come out on the health care package very quickly, and you’re going to see universal health care in this country. It was the biggest topic in the primaries. Obviously, it was Hillary’s number one deal. We went back and forth. Our two campaigns–how many were covered and all, but basically, you’re gonna have universal healthcare coverage next year and I tell companies, ‘It’s coming. It’s the right thing to do.’