Health Care

ObamaCare was signed into law on March 23, 2010, after a long and drawn out process which saw Congressional rules bended and the will of the American people ignored. Since its passage, public opposition to ObamaCare has continued to grow, and the more that people learn about what was in it, the more they demand repeal.

As a fiscal matter, ObamaCare is a disaster. With all budget gimmicks taken into account, ObamaCare will cost taxpayers $2.6 trillion in its first ten full years of enactment, and it will add over $700 billion to our nation's debt. For these reasons alone, the bill should be repealed. But even if the fiscal math of ObamaCare added up, the policies it imposes should be repealed because they are detrimental to our nation’s health care system. ObamaCare and its mandates have already resulted in skyrocketing health care premiums throughout the country and millions of Americans not being able to keep their health insurance.

Despite all the fiscal and policy problems surrounding ObamaCare, the most important reason for pursuing repeal is that it is blatantly unconstitutional. ObamaCare’s individual mandate, its private sector rules and regulations, and its expansion of the Medicaid burden on states represent a level of federal involvement in the lives of every day Americans and in the affairs of the states that would horrify our Founding Fathers. The Supreme Court agreed that the Medicaid expansion, as written, was unconstitutional, but they upheld the vast majority of the law through a misguided rewriting of the individual mandate - interpreting it as a tax despite the fact that is was clearly written as a legal mandate.

The Supreme Court did, undeniably, get one thing right in its decision: The court emphasized that its decision "does not express any opinion on the wisdom of the Affordable Care Act. Under the Constitution, that judgment is reserved to the people." Immediately after ObamaCare passed, I drafted and introduced a bill to completely repeal 100% of ObamaCare, and I am pleased that this language was passed overwhelmingly in the House on January 19, 2010. I will continue to work on defunding and repealing ObamaCare until it is fully uprooted from the U.S. Code.

Once we repeal ObamaCare, we can get to work on making the kinds of commonsense reforms that will lower health care costs, increase access, and improve the quality of our nation’s health care system. We should allow small businesses to form pools with other small businesses to spread out the risk and lower the costs of health care. We should allow individuals to purchase their insurance across state lines, bringing more competition to the industry while reducing costs and increasing quality. We should provide for meaningful reform of our medical liability system, which would address one of the major reasons for the rise in health care costs in recent years: frivolous lawsuits and the practice of defense medicine that results from them. In addition to these common sense solutions, I believe we must increase the attractiveness and use of health savings accounts and end the tax discrepancy between individuals who purchase their own insurance and those who get health care insurance through their employees. We should pursue each of these policies with stand-alone legislation, so that good ideas are not held hostage to massive, thousand-page pieces of legislation and so the American people can hold their elected representatives accountable for their votes on each of these specific provisions.