‘One study showed that Texas, with less than 10 percent of the population, accounted for almost one-third of private-sector jobs created in high-paying sectors in recent years. And if the President is interested in duplicating that success at a federal level, he might take note of the fact that policymakers in Austin have taken a very different approach from Washington when it comes to how they tax and spend. Basically, they do less of it – with no income tax, for instance, and a low ratio of spending per capita. And they don’t ram through laws like Obamacare.’
Recent Press Releases
Speaker Boehner, Leader McConnell: “We Respectfully Decline to Recommend Appointments” to ObamaCare IPAB
May 9, 2013
WASHINGTON, DC – House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) today sent the following letter to President Obama informing him that they will be declining to recommend appointments to the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). “We believe Congress should repeal IPAB,” they wrote, “just as we believe we ought to repeal the entire health care law” which is driving up costs and making it harder for small businesses to hire new workers.
Click here for a PDF of the letter and find the full text below:
May 9, 2013
The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
We write to respond to your March 29, 2013 letter requesting that we submit the names of individuals to serve on the Individual Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which was created in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Public Law 111-148). Because the law will give IPAB’s 15 unelected, unaccountable individuals the ability to deny seniors access to innovative care, we respectfully decline to recommend appointments.
As you know, we opposed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act because we knew it would increase health costs, impose costly burdens on job creators, and raid Medicare to pay for a massive new entitlement. In order to allow supporters to claim that the law’s Medicare cuts would be realized in the future, it tasked IPAB with reducing payments to providers or eliminating payments for certain treatments and procedures altogether. These reduced payments will force providers to stop seeing Medicare patients, the same way an increased number of doctors have stopped taking Medicaid patients. This will lead to access problems, waiting lists and denied care for seniors.
The unfortunate result is that decisions which impact America’s seniors will be made in the absence of the democratic process, without the system of checks and balances that would normally apply to important matters of public policy. Yet your recent budget called for expanding IPAB by tasking it with making even larger cuts to Medicare than those called for in the health law, even though the trustees of the Medicare program have told us that IPAB’s provider cuts would be “difficult to achieve in practice,” because of the denied care that seniors would experience.
We believe Congress should repeal IPAB, just as we believe we ought to repeal the entire health care law. In its place, we should work in a bipartisan manner to develop the long-term structural changes that are needed to strengthen and protect Medicare for today’s seniors, their children, and their grandchildren. We hope establishing this board never becomes a reality, which is why full repeal of the Affordable Care Act remains our goal.
Sincerely,
John Boehner Mitch McConnell
Speaker of the House of Representatives Senate Republican Leader
Obama Labor Nominee a ‘Crusading Ideologue’
May 8, 2013
‘Taken together, all of this paints the picture, for me at least, not of a passionate liberal who sees himself as patiently operating within the system and through the democratic process to advance a particular set of strongly held beliefs, but a crusading ideologue whose conviction about his own rightness on the issues leads him to believe the law does not apply to him. Unbound by the rules that apply to everyone else, Mr. Perez seems to view himself as free to employ whatever means at his disposal, legal or otherwise, to achieve his ideological goals. To say this is problematic would be an understatement.’