On the public option being voted down in the Senate Finance Committee:

The public option is dead. We have been saying it over and over again. It is a dead parrot…When you have a three-vote majority, and you lose by five, and you know that there are a lot of Blue Dog Democrats in the House who are against it — it will pass in the House, but in the Senate it doesn’t have a chance.
What I don’t understand is why it is so important to the liberals. They can dangle the public option and drop it at the end, because if they do what I suspect they will do, which is to heavily regulate the insurance companies where they [the government authorities] decide what monies are coming in and what monies are going out — by regulating if you can use preexisting conditions, for example, and by mandating that individuals have to buy insurance, which will create a revenue stream — the government is going to control the insurance companies the way it controls utilities.
They’re going to turn the insurance companies into utilities like AT&T in the past, and essentially insurance companies are going to have to go to government for rate hikes.
So if you can have the government-run health care through the guise and disguise of so-called private insurance, why do you need a public option? I think it’s a lot easier to go around all this and simply heavily regulate insurance companies, which will produce government-run health care.

On how the cost of health-care legislation will be paid:

The president had talked about waste and abuse in the $500 billion [savings from Medicare and Medicaid]. Anybody who believes that will believe anything.
You cannot cut half a trillion out of Medicare and promise that you won’t touch a hair on the head of a senior. Everybody understands it is a phony argument.
There will be paper regulations about mandating cuts in Medicare. We already have them in legislation from the late ’90’s where there’s an outside committee which recommends the cuts in Medicare. In the last six years, every year, the Congress has waived these cuts and none of them have been instituted.
So we know it’s not going to happen, and we know that no government is going to cut senior care. What it’s going to do is expand the deficit.

On whether there is a rightward trend in European politics:

We’re headed left into a kind of a social-democratic model. Obama wants government involvement in health care and energy, et cetera. The Europeans who have lived under it for a few decades are moving the other way. They have seen it and they don’t particularly like it.
In Germany, what was so interesting is that the big winner was a third party, the Free Democrats, who are historically almost Anglo-Saxon. They were very much for the free market, lower taxes and regulations. And they tripled the amount of their support.
The Christian Democrats — Merkel — actually lost about 8 percent, but in coalition they had a majority and will have a strong stable center-right government that will try to deregulate.
The really interesting story is the Social Democrats. The socialists were massacred, the lowest total since the Second World War, and they’re in the wilderness for a long time.
So what you have is Germany, France, Britain, the big three, all rejecting socialist parties. In France, of course, the socialists are reeling in disarray. And in Britain, the Labor Party today in a poll is running third. It isn’t even running second. If you had an election it would be destroyed.