W. Todd Akin: “So let's try and get up to 50,000 feet here and take a look at the sort of choices there are before Americans as to how…”

“So let's try and get up to 50,000 feet here and take a look at the sort of choices there are before Americans as to how we approach health care. It seems to me that in the beginning, you've got the sort of supply and demand situation. If everybody in America got absolutely the very, very best medical care that you could get, it would just bankrupt the country probably because the supply and demand law says that if you don't have to pay anything at all, people are just going to get the very most expensive thing they can do. So basically the whole country stops if you try to give everybody the very best thing possible. So the question then is how do you balance supply and demand? And we usually have a thing we call freedom, and we allow individuals to work hard, earn money, and then they spend their money to buy what they want to buy with it. They can choose whether they want health care, or a vacation, or food, or shoes, or a new car, and that's called freedom. So that's the free market, which allows people to decide how much money they can afford to pay on health care.”