Coburn: Obama creating a 'Soviet-style' health care system

President Barack Obama may not be a communist, but he is attempting a "Soviet-style" takeover of the health care system, according to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK).

On Sunday, CBS host Norah O'Donnell asked Coburn what he meant when he told the Eagle Daily Investor that the president was trying to "Sovietize" the U.S. health care system.

"Well it means the bureaucrats and politicians are in charge of your health care and that’s exactly what this has done," Coburn explained. "There’s not going to be individual choice."

"Remember the components of this bill. There’s an IPAB bill, the preventative services task force, that is going to mandate what care will be given and what care won’t be. There’s the innovation council that will approve or disapprove of any new innovation. We have three agencies that are totally going to take away the options of your freedom about your care and about what you and your physician decide is best for you."

"So Soviet style -- what I'm saying is you’re going to have a bureaucracy," he added.

As Think Progress pointed out, the Independent Payment Advisory Board -- or IPAB -- cannot "include any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or Medicare beneficiary premiums…increase Medicare beneficiary cost- sharing (including deductibles, coinsurance, and co- payments), or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria."

"The term 'Sovietized' is intended to put the Red Scare into everyone, of course," Crooks and Liars' Karoli wrote. "It's just a higher form of the scare word 'socialism' intended to invoke memories of diving under desks in elementary school so the Russkies wouldn't nuke us without the benefit of a desk over our heads."

"If one were actually astute enough to have a discussion over Coburn's red-baiting, they might begin with the general welfare clause of the Constitution, and ask Mr. Coburn how it was that our founding fathers were hard at work 'sovietizing' this nation well before he was even a zygote."

Watch this video from CBS's Face the Nation, broadcast July 1, 2012.