By Representative Virginia Foxx
August 6, 2012. The President put the economy on notice when he signed Obamacare into law in 2010 with zero bipartisan support, and over the objections of the vast majority of Americans.
Even before full implementation, the President’s law has fallen short of its promises to spur immediate job creation, lessen the deficit, not raise taxes, allow people the choice to keep their current health plans, and reduce health care costs for individuals and families.
Today, premium costs are up over $1,000 per family, 20 million are at risk of losing their current health insurance (i.e. the Doctors they “like” and would prefer to keep), 48% of businesses aren’t hiring to brace for rising health care costs and latent tax increases – which will amount to an $813 billion hit on middle class families and job creators, and by 2021, the Congressional Budget Office estimates there will be 800,000 fewer jobs because of the President’s health law. In addition, the law’s cost projections have ballooned from $938 billion to $2.6 trillion over the next decade,
Republicans in the House will not stand by and let this happen, nor tolerate the defense of such epic failure. We have voted time and again to repeal, defund, and dismantle Obamacare, and we’ve been successful in halting three of its programs and cutting $305 million from the IRS’s budget to implement some of the law’s tax provisions. And we must not stop in this effort until the remainder of the law is sent to the ash heap of history where the American people, and future generations, will be shielded from its costs.
The Supreme Court definitively ruled last month that Obamacare’s unprecedented individual insurance mandate is, in fact, a tax, despite promises to the contrary and assurances that the middle class would be spared from any such increases under an Obama Administration. To levy this middle class tax increase in the middle of a recession is mind-boggling since the President rightly said in 2009, “The last thing you want to do is to raise taxes in the middle of a recession because that would just suck up, take more demand out of the economy and put businesses in a further hole.” June’s unemployment figures show the effect imminent taxes have on an already ailing economy and provide every incentive to scrap this health care takeover and begin fresh with real health care reform that recognizes the importance of a strong job market in ensuring health security for the American people.
The legislation, I believe, helped bring us the longest stretch of high unemployment since the Great Depression. Therefore, should we not take a different tack? The plurality of Americans who believe Obamacare will hurt the economy and the 55% of all political persuasions, surveyed by Rasmussen, who favor the law’s repeal certainly seem to think so. Add to them the twenty-six states that challenged Obamacare’s constitutionality and Florida, Texas, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Wisconsin that have already indicated their unwillingness to shoulder the law’s cost burdens by implementing its prescribed state Medicaid expansion.
Health care reform is critically important, but the federal government has failed as its champion by attempting to supplant the role of doctors and patients in the health care relationship in naming itself and its bureaucrats as the unquestionable arbiters of patient care. It is out of respect for this relationship and for the hard-fought earnings of taxpayers that I cast my 32nd vote to repeal Obamacare this month. If we are serious about removing barriers to job creation, growing the economy, and sparing the American people the weight of massive new taxes, supporting the full repeal of the President’s health law is critical.
Republicans in Congress are still committed to working with the American people to find patient-centered health care solutions that improve the quality and affordability of care and ensure more Americans have access to the best health services the free market can provide. Obamacare, as we have already seen, is not that solution. Only those committed to defending failure would argue otherwise.
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