(OneNewsNow.com) - A former Republican senator predicts most Americans will reject the universal healthcare plans touted by 2008 Democratic presidential candidates.

Illinois Senator Barack Obama said Thursday that every American should have healthcare coverage within six years. According to the Democratic presidential hopeful, "The time has come for universal healthcare in America," and that he is "absolutely determined" to have such a system in place "by the end of the first term of the next president." New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and former North Carolina Senator John Edwards have promised to offer their universal healthcare plans soon.

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, now with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, says such "socialist" plans would be a nightmare for America.

"I don't believe in government-run medicine," says Santorum, "and [what they are proposing is] government-financed medicine for all Americans." According to the former senator, the European approach to healthcare should be discarded.

"That's a socialist view, a view that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have held and do hold, and it represents the worst of what Europe has to teach us," he says. "If we look at all the European systems that have gone in that direction, they all are now disastrous in terms of what they're doing to the government, what they're doing to economic growth, [and] what they're doing to the quality of healthcare and access to healthcare."

Santorum says it always sounds good "to get something for nothing," but there are always sacrifices in terms of inefficiency and the rationing of care. He offers an example.

"If you look at Canada and cancer survival rates in Canada, [they] are a third of what they are here in the United States simply because people can't get access to care," he notes. "If you're really sick in Canada, you just don't treated because it's a rationing based on money ...."

And that, Santorum believes, is something the American public will not accept.

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