Remember Sheldon Adelson?

You know, that old guy with the orange hair who backed Newt Gingrich in the Republican primaries and Mitt Romney in the general? The casino magnate who spent millions of his own money to defeat President Obama? Yeah, that guy. According to a piece in The Wall Street Journal, Adelson is in favor of socialized medicine. Say what?

Finally,  he said casually: “And by the way I’m in favor of a socialized-like health care.”

Asked he was sure he was in the right party, he and his wife laughed.

“Look, nobody agrees with 100 % of their planks” in the GOP platform, he and Dr. Adelson both said.

His interest in health care comes from his wife, and Israel’s national medical-care system, he said, as well as his Judaism.

“I think that to take care of everybody is part of Tikkun Olam” the Hebrew motto meaning “repair the world,” he said. “And to deprive somebody for money of heath care or [medical] testing is bordering on criminal.”

But he said, “I’m against this Obamacare because it’s making the [medical] decisions based upon money.” If one goes to Israel, he said, one chooses among four or five HMO’s. “You go in there you get all your health care from cradle to grave.”

“When I learned about that [Israeli] system,  to my own surprise I said, ‘Oh,  I’m in favor of socialized medicine’– which is such a bad word here,” he said.

Why does he favor it? “Because everybody pays” into the system, and the doctors don’t deny the elderly health treatments like hip surgery just because they are old, he said.