Surgeon-turned-pundit Ben Carson has been a long-time critic of the Affordable Care Act, and now he has taken his comparisons to the health reform law to a new level, saying the health reform law is worse than 9/11 in a new interview.

Carson, who has become a favorite among Republicans in recent months placing high in presidential straw polls at both CPAC and the recent Republican Leadership Conference, made the comments to the Daily Beast in an interview this past weekend, saying the law “has been even more damaging to the United States than the terrorist attacks of 9/11.”

When asked to clarify whether he thought “Obamacare or Osama bin Laden” had caused families more pain, Carson replied, “Things that are isolated issues as opposed to things that fundamentally change the United States of America and shift power from the people to the government. That is a huge shift.”

An aide to Carson told the Daily Caller Thursday his opinions had been misrepresented in The Daily Beast interview.

“He thinks that’s crazy,” Carson aide Armstrong Williams told the Daily Caller. “You can’t compare anything to 9/11.”

“It was a bait,” Williams said of the set-up question that prompted Carson to compare the health reform law to 9/11. “He just started saying, ‘well, is it worse than this? Is it worse than that?’ It was just hostile. Carson didn’t respond.”

Carson said in May the scandal over the Veterans Administration hospital backlog was a “gift from God” because of how it has exposed the failings of government involvement in health care.

“I think what happens with the veterans is a gift from God” he said in a Fox News appearance captured by Media Matters. “To show us what happens when you take layers and layers of bureaucracy and place them between the patients and the health care provider.”

Carson has regularly argued the health reform is all about control, making headlines in the fall of 2013 when he said that the health reform law is “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”

“It is slavery in a way because it is making all of us subservient to the government,” he said at a Value Voters Summit, according to Right Wing Watch.

Carson has been defiant in the face of those who’ve criticized his rhetoric, saying he hates political correctness and “will continue to defy the PC police” at a recent CPAC speech.

