Maine Senator in Spat With ‘Fox & Friends’ Hosts Over Obamacare: ‘Don’t Lecture Me’

Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, and the hosts of “Fox & Friends” engaged in a contentious debate about Obamacare yesterday as comments from the law’s architect reverberated on Capitol Hill.

As previously reported on The Daily Signal, Jonathan Gruber credited the Affordable Care Act’s passage to “a lack of transparency” and “the stupidity of the American voter.” Gruber worked with the Obama administration and congressional Democrats to write the law.

After replaying a clip of Gruber’s comments, host Brian Kilmeade asked King, “Are you as outraged as most of America?”

King said that he didn’t “endorse those kind of comments” and noted that he wasn’t in office during the Obamacare debate in 2009 and 2010.

Another host, Kimberly Guilfoyle, then pressed King on Gruber’s admission that policymakers weren’t “transparent and forthcoming” about the law, and the administration knew that it would “tax and penalize” the American people.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” replied King. “Tax and penalize, hold it, hold it, hold it. We’ve got 8 million people that have insurance now that didn’t before. And don’t lecture me about this because 40 years ago I had insurance. If I hadn’t had it, it caught a cancer that saved my life. If I hadn’t had insurance, I’d be dead.”

Kilmeade and Guilfoyle both questioned what that had to do with Gruber’s statement.

King retorted:

This is one guy. I don’t know who this guy was. All I know is that it’s important for people to have health insurance. And if you guys are saying people shouldn’t have health insurance, I don’t know where you’re coming from.

“Oh my goodness,” interjected Kilmeade.