Barbour: Health bill like forcing gun purchases

In an apparent effort to jumble the battle lines in the fight over health care reform, Mississippi Republican Gov. Haley Barbour on Sunday compared the individual mandate for health insurance to forcing Americans to buy guns.

"Not only you must buy a product called health insurance, you must buy a product that has been approved by the United States government, and the price of that product will be fixed by the United States," Barbour said on ABC's "This Week."

"I do not believe the United States government has a right, it has the authority or power to force us to purchase health insurance any more than, in the name of homeland security, they can force every American to have to buy a gun," the governor said.

Barbour was endorsing lawsuits that Republican attorneys general have filed, challenging the constitutionality of the legislation and rebutting a comment in which former Reagan Solicitor General Charles Fried dismissed the suits as posturing.

"Anybody who proposes something like this is either ignorant -- I mean, deeply ignorant -- or just grandstanding in a preposterous way. It is simply a political ploy and a pathetic one at that," Fried told ABC.