Slap to Obama: GOP House votes to kill health law

DAVID ESPO

AP Spe­cial Correspondent

WASHINGTON — Press­ing an election-year point, Repub­li­cans pushed yet another bill through the House on Wednes­day to repeal the nation’s two-year-old health care law, a maneu­ver that forced Democ­rats to choose between Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s sig­na­ture domes­tic achieve­ment and a pub­lic that is per­sis­tently skep­ti­cal of its value.

The vote was 244–185, with five Demo­c­ra­tic defec­tors sid­ing with Republicans.

By Repub­li­can count, the vote marked the 33rd time in 18 months that the tea party-infused GOP major­ity has tried to elim­i­nate, defund or oth­er­wise scale back the pro­gram — oppo­nents scorn­fully call it “Oba­macare” — since the GOP took con­trol of the House.

Repeal this year by Con­gress is doomed, since the Democratic-controlled Sen­ate will never agree.

But Illi­nois Rep. Peter Roskam said before join­ing other Repub­li­cans in Wednesday’s House vote: “Here’s the good news. The vot­ers get the last word in Novem­ber. Stay tuned.”

Nor was the vote in the House the only act of polit­i­cal the­ater dur­ing the day as cam­paign con­cerns increas­ingly crowded out bipar­ti­san attempts at law-making in the Capitol.

One day after a cam­paign­ing Obama called on Con­gress to pass his pro­posal to extend tax cuts on all but the high­est wage earn­ers, Sen­ate Repub­li­can leader Mitch McConnell of Ken­tucky offered to allow an imme­di­ate vote. “I can’t see why Democ­rats wouldn’t want to give him the chance” to sign the bill, he said.

Sen­ate Major­ity Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., coun­tered by block­ing an imme­di­ate vote. “We’ll get to the tax issues. That way we’ll be able to talk in more detail about Gov­er­nor Romney’s taxes,” he said in a ref­er­ence to Demo­c­ra­tic cam­paign attacks on the GOP pres­i­den­tial candidate’s over­seas invest­ment, the rel­a­tively low rate of income tax he is required to pay and his refusal thus far to release per­sonal tax returns dat­ing before 2010.

The health care debate roiled the cam­paign for the White House as well as Congress.

Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Mitt Rom­ney drew boos from his largely black audi­ence at the NAACP con­ven­tion when he vowed to wipe out Obama’s overhaul.

In the House, Repub­li­cans assailed the law as a job-killing threat to the eco­nomic recov­ery, but Democ­rats said repeal would elim­i­nate con­sumer pro­tec­tions that already have affected millions.

“The intent of the president’s health care law was to lower costs and to help cre­ate jobs. … Instead, it is mak­ing our econ­omy worse, dri­ving up costs and mak­ing it harder for small busi­nesses to hire,” said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. He cited a study by a busi­ness group that esti­mated that one of the bill’s taxes would cost up to 249,000 jobs, and a dif­fer­ent esti­mate that a sec­ond tax would “put as many as 47,100 in jeopardy.”

But House Demo­c­ra­tic leader Nancy Pelosi said repeal would take away pro­vi­sions that guar­an­tee cov­er­age for chil­dren with pre-existing med­ical con­di­tions, reduce pre­scrip­tion drug costs for some seniors, pro­vide for pro­tec­tive checks for patients of all ages and ensure rebates total­ing more than $1 bil­lion this sum­mer for pol­icy holders.

“What a Valen­tine to the health insur­ance indus­try,” Pelosi said scorn­fully of the repeal mea­sure. The party leader was a dri­ving force behind the over­haul when she was speaker and Democ­rats held a majority.

At its core, the law will require nearly all Amer­i­cans to pur­chase insur­ance begin­ning in 2014, a so-called indi­vid­ual man­date that Repub­li­cans seized on to make their case that the pro­gram amounted to a gov­ern­ment takeover of health care. The law’s con­sti­tu­tion­al­ity was upheld two weeks ago in a 5–4 Supreme Court opin­ion writ­ten by Chief Jus­tice John Roberts.

There was never any doubt that Repub­li­cans had the votes to pass the repeal in the House on Wednes­day — or that it would die in the Sen­ate, where Democ­rats pos­sessed more than enough strength to block it.

That’s what hap­pened in Jan­u­ary 2011, when the newly installed Repub­li­can major­ity first voted to repeal the law a few days after tak­ing office.

In the months since, the GOP has taken repeated fur­ther swipes at the law, includ­ing votes to deny salaries to any gov­ern­ment offi­cials who enforce it, to abol­ish a board of offi­cials charged with hold­ing down Medicare costs in the future and to repeal a tax on med­ical devices.

With the excep­tion of a few rel­a­tively mod­est changes accepted by the White House, all the rest have died in the Senate.

Some Democ­rats sought some­thing of a mid­dle ground.

Rep. Ron Bar­ber, D-Ariz., elected to his seat a few weeks ago, said the GOP-inspired repeal leg­is­la­tion was a cha­rade and showed the House “cares more about polit­i­cal grand­stand­ing than in get­ting things done.” At the same time, he said, “We must work to improve the leg­is­la­tion,” a bow to those who are less than enthu­si­as­tic about it, and a point he made dur­ing his recent campaign.

The five Democ­rats who sided with Repub­li­cans in the house vote were Reps. Larry Kissell and Mike McIn­tyre of North Car­olina, Jim Math­e­son of Utah, Mike Ross of Arkansas and Dan Boren of Oklahoma.

All five voted against the law’s pas­sage in 2010. Boren, Ross and McIn­tyre voted to repeal the law in Jan­u­ary 2011, while the other two law­mak­ers voted to keep it in place.

In an inter­view after Wednesday’s vote, Math­e­son said he opposed repeal the first time because he wanted the Supreme Court to rule on the law’s con­sti­tu­tion­al­ity. He said he sup­ports some ele­ments of the law, but on the whole “this does not cre­ate a path for us to have a sus­tain­able health care sys­tem for this coun­try and that’s why I think it’s time to hit the reset but­ton and start over.”

Kissell’s office did not imme­di­ately respond to a request for comment.

Boehner said Repub­li­cans wanted to give Democ­rats who had pre­vi­ously voted to sus­tain the law a chance to recon­sider, con­tend­ing that “most Amer­i­cans not only oppose this health care law — they sup­port fully repeal­ing it.”

In a state­ment issued moments after the vote, McConnell said he would press for a vote in the Sen­ate, as well.

Pub­lic reac­tion to the law has been con­sis­tently neg­a­tive, but apart from con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­cans, it is less clear what sup­port exists for repeal.

In a Wash­ing­ton Post/ABC News poll this month, 47 per­cent of those sur­veyed said they opposed the law, 47 per­cent said they sup­ported it and 6 per­cent expressed no opinion.

Among those who said they were opposed or had no opin­ion, 33 per­cent said they wanted it all repealed, 30 per­cent said they wanted parts repealed and 34 per­cent said they wanted to wait and see what hap­pens with­out repeal.

Posted by AP News on Jul 11 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.