Thank you for contacting me with your support for repealing ObamaCare. It is good to hear from you.
As you may know, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (more commonly known as "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. While supporters of the bill cite a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score stating the bill would reduce the federal deficit, they ignore the manipulation of facts and figures that was used to calculate that score, which hides the legislation's true cost. For example, the CBO was forced to double-count $521 billion from Social Security payroll taxes, CLASS Act premiums, and Medicare cuts. The CBO also didn't have time, due to the rushed nature of the bill's passage, to include in their estimate the cost of setting up and administering the massive new law. These ignored costs include the cost of hiring new health care bureaucrats to develop and enforce the new regulations and the thousands of new IRS agents needed to enforce the individual mandate. In the final equation, ObamaCare contains $2.6 trillion in new spending in its first ten full years of enactment, and it would add over $700 billion to the debt. For these reasons alone, the bill should be repealed.
ObamaCare is also devastating to Medicare. The bill contained $716 billion in front-end cuts to Medicare that will affect today's seniors. The President claims that these cuts extend the solvency of Medicare, but this is just one more budget gimmick, and perhaps the most cynical of them all. The fact is, and Medicare's own actuaries agree, that the money ObamaCare raided from Medicare will be used to pay for new ObamaCare programsand will not be reinvested into Medicare. Finally, and perhaps more importantly in the long run, ObamaCare puts in place the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which is a 15-member board of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats that will be empowered to slash Medicare spending further and in ways that will lead to denied care for current and future seniors. There is no question in my mind that the most important step Congress can take for Medicare beneficiaries is the full, 100% repeal of ObamaCare.
Even if the fiscal math of ObamaCare added up, the bill was pursued under the false pretense that the government can impose costly mandates on our nation's health care system and then suppress the increased costs with price controls. Instead, as opponents of the bill warned, ObamaCare and its mandates have resulted in skyrocketing health care premiums throughout the country and millions of Americans not being able to keep their health insurance. In order to stay in business despite ObamaCare's new costs and mandates, some insurance companies have been consolidating with one another, resulting in less choice for consumers. Others have simply stopped offering various health insurance policies. For those insurers who have not made such dramatic changes, many have simply passed on the new costs of complying with the law to consumers in the form of higher premiums.
In order to hide the devastating effects of its own signature accomplishment, the Obama Administration has been offering hundreds of waivers to private sector companies, allowing them to more or less ignore some of the provisions of ObamaCare. While this is good for those companies and the consumers who rely on them, it proves that even supporters of the bill concede that it will have devastating consequences for Americans if implemented as written. Even worse, however, providing waivers for select businesses invites political favoritism and bullying. ObamaCare is only two years old, and many more harmful rules, regulations, and mandates are set to be handed down in the coming months and years. That is one more reason why this law needs to be repealed immediately.
Despite all the fiscal and policy problems surrounding ObamaCare, the most important reason for pursuing repeal is that ObamaCare is blatantly unconstitutional. If ObamaCare is implemented as planned, it will represent a devastating change in the relationship between the federal government and the citizens of this country. 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 private companies and the sovereign states that would greatly concern our Founding Fathers. When looking at the Constitutional framework that they set up to govern this country, it is not difficult to argue that the individual mandate, which requires every American to purchase government-approved health insurance, is the most blatantly unconstitutional law to come out of Washington in very a long time. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court creatively, and I believe wrongly, interpreted the individual mandate to be a "tax," even though the law itself refers to the provision as a "mandate" no less than eighteen times, and never refers to the penalty as a "tax."
The Supreme Court did, undeniably, get one thing right in its decision. In the decision, the Court emphasized that its ruling "does not express any opinion on the wisdom of the Affordable Care Act." ObamaCare is clearly bad policy, which will result in higher health insurance premiums, government rationing of Medicare, less health care choices for consumers, and an exploding federal debt. I will continue to do all that I can to ensure that ObamaCare is ripped out by the roots and repealed as if it had never been enacted.
Thank you once again for contacting me. Please do not hesitate to do so again in the future.
Sincerely,
S
Steve King
Member of Congress
