Giuliani: Obama’s Number One Priority was an ‘Ideological Commitment to Government Takeover of Medicine’

Former presidential candidate and New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani minced no words when it came to the Obama administration's massive health care overhaul. In an exclusive interview with CNBC's Maria Bartiromo, Giuliani stated that, plain and simple, it "was an ideological act by the Congress" liberal Democrats "are very happy about."  

"Instead of privatizing - which is what our government should be doing - we're taking major roles of the economy for the United States government," Giuliani told "Closing Bell" anchor Bartiromo. "And it is not an exaggeration to say we are starting to look more like a European social democracy than we are an American free-market capitalist society."

A self-avowed free-market advocate, Bartiromo attempted to defend the Democrats' actions for a second: "Let me take devil's advocate for a minute here and say, ‘Okay, you say socialism and we're seeing this government takeover. Well maybe some of this stuff wasn't working before, so how do we know this isn't going to work better?'" she posed.  

Giuliani lamented how disingenuous Obama's entire argument about a health care "crisis" was, seeing as how much of the significant provisions do not go into effect for years - and quite possibly under the watch of a Republican president.

"There's no doubt that health care, health insurance, the whole thing is very distorted, not working as well as it should work - not a ‘crisis' like he claims, if it was a crisis he would have taken action immediately to save lives - but the reality is what they're doing is going to make it worse," Giuliani replid. "What health care in this country needs is less government involvement...We're going in the exact opposite direction."

"And of course this comes after - and you can't isolate this - taking over the banks, taking over the auto companies, now taking over massive parts of health care," the former mayor said, before alluding to another significant aspect of the bill that's been overshadowed. "And slipped in, sort of in the middle of the night was taking over student loans."

And with the passage of the bill, Bartiromo agreed that Obama had broken his campaign pledge on taxes. 

"Remember 45 to 50 percent of the people in American don't pay taxes," Giuliani pointed out. "So now you're going to take that other 50, 52 percent - they're going to hit them so hard with taxes that it will really shrink our economy."

Steering the conversation toward unemployment and the economy, Bartiromo mentioned how in spite of Obama's assurances that jobs were his top priority, his actions appeared otherwise.

Argued Giuliani: "Jobs is not his number one priority. He would have spent this past year working on jobs. My number one priority when I was mayor of New York City was bringing down crime. I know what a number one priority is - so he can't fool me that jobs is his number one priority."

"His ideological commitment to government takeover of medicine was his number one priority and Nancy Pelosi's number one priority," he continued. "This was an ideological act by the Congress yesterday, not a sensible health care decision. The reality is their ideological viewpoint trumps polls. They believe they know better and they have known better for fifty or a hundred years ‘we need socialized medicine.'"

In light of the recent comments Rep. Barney Frank made in an interview, Bartiromo found herself agreeing and did not argue with the assessment.   

"There are things in this bill that would be laughable if they didn't do so much damage to our society," Giuliani said.