What's With The Scare Quotes?

National Journal deploys them in a strange way.

Obama didn't say that in July 2009—or any time while the program was being debated in Congress. He couldn't. He couldn't stand up before the American public and say that the only way to achieve the program's goals was to reallocate money within the health insurance market. That there would need to be a transfer of wealth—from the young to the old, from men to women, from the healthy to the sick. That to raise the floor, you had to lower the ceiling. To do so would have handed his enemies the kind of weaponry they craved, validation that Obama was indeed some sort of "socialist" who believed in "redistribution."

Fine, but isn't the point of the article that "redistribution" is exactly what the law does? Why are we wagging our fingers over a word agreed to be a completely accurate description?