Federer and universal health insurance

Arch Pundit told me about this. Here is the press release from the Jeff Smith campaign.

**************FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE******************
May 23rd, 2004--- 3rd District Congressional candidate Jeff Smith (D-St. Louis County) strongly condemns Republican Bill Federer for comparing a single payer system of universal health insurance to Nazi genocide.
At the Marine Villa neighborhood candidate forum, at St. Alexius hospital on St. Louis City’s South Side, Republican Bill Federer answered a question about universal health insurance by saying that the Nazi Germany was a socialist society that operated a single payer healthcare system until government revenue fell, at which point the Nazi’s began to slaughter the retarded and handicapped.
Smith said he had never heard anything quite so absurd as Federer’s comparison of proposals to improve the healthcare and quality of life of 44 million uninsured Americans to the Nazi slaughter of 12 million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, mentally retarded, handicapped, and other so called “undesirables,”
“I cannot believe that in 2004, I heard a candidate from a major party compare ideas about improving healthcare for the 44 million Americans who have no access to insurance to a methodical system of slaughter. The radical right wing in this country is so brainwashed by their hatred of government that Bill Federer legitimately seems to believe that subsidized healthcare led to the organized murder of millions.”
Smith continued, “Republicans like Bill Federer have no qualms about using the power of the state to spy on what library books you can read or to get between a woman and her doctor or to subsidize multi-national corporations that send jobs overseas. But the minute someone proposes helping the working poor and improving people’s quality of life, all of a sudden the Nazi’s are racing down Kingshighway. I have never heard priorities that upside down.”