Money Morning reports:

Healthcare costs in the United States are like a tapeworm eating at our economic body.

Those words come from famed investor Warren Buffett, who said he would scrap Obamacare and start all over.

“We have a health system that, in terms of costs, is really out of control,” he added. “And if you take this line and you project what has been happening into the future, we will get less and less competitive. So we need something else.”

Buffett insists that without changes to Obamacare average citizens will suffer.

“What we have now is untenable over time,” said Buffett, an early supporter of President Obama. “That kind of a cost compared to the rest of the world is really like a tapeworm eating, you know, at our economic body.”

Buffett does not believe that providing insurance for everyone is the first step to take in correcting our nation’s healthcare system.

“Attack the costs first, and then worry about expanding coverage,” he said. “I would much rather see another plan that really attacks costs. And I think that’s what the American public wants to see. I mean, the American public is not behind this bill.”

The Weekly Standard adds:

Republicans should take Buffett’s words as an invitation to propose a long-overdue Obamacare alternative, one that would lower costs, fix the unfairness in the tax code, deal with the specific problem of preexisting conditions, breathe life into a moribund individual insurance market, and constitute real reform. It’s time to delay Obamacare and propose an alternative, then repeal Obamacare (in 2017) and pass the alternative.

UPDATE: It appears that Buffett made his anti-Obamacare comments in 2010, thereby showing that he, like most of the American people, has opposed Obamacare since even before it was passed—a point that Mark Hemingway addressed yesterday in response to USA Today’s implication that Americans’ widespread dislike of Obamacare is mostly attributable to Republicans’ efforts to fight it.

In other instances, I have written that people pay too much attention to Buffett’s political views. In this case, though, consider what Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns — Dairy Queen, employer of a lot of minimum-wage employees who are finding their hours cut because their employers (generally franchise owners, not International Dairy Queen) foresee spiralling insurance costs.

That’s already happening in other businesses, which came as a surprise to U.S. Ron Kind (D–La Crosse), who at an ObamaCare informational session/pep rally claimed “we aren’t seeing” companies cut employees’ hours due to ObamaCare. Kind apparently isn’t paying attention, since two people at the forum said their hours had been cut, and a third, who works with businesses, had customers who were cutting their employees’ hours.