Republicans in the House of Representatives are seeking a repeal of President Obama’s health care reform package that was passed into law one year ago.
The Senate’s Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care bill (H.R. 3590) was followed by the House of Representatives’ Reconciliation Act of 2010 (H.R. 4872), which was passed last March.
The reform law, known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA), expands health coverage for children, ends most lifetime and annual care limits and increases access to preventive care. The law is scheduled for full implementation in 2014.
In January 2011, the House voted 245-189 to pass the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act, which aims to repeal the ACA.
The United Spinal Association, Families USA and the National Spinal Cord Injury Association recently spoke in Washington D.C. to oppose the repeal in solidarity with more than 150 national organizations.
Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA said, “We support the Affordable Care Act because it brings important health care benefits and rights to America’s families.”
“Repeal is a terrible step backwards. It would eliminate protections newly provided to people with pre-existing conditions, withdraw health coverage for young adults, deprive seniors of prescription drug coverage they need and end subsidies that small businesses need to offer affordable health coverage to their workers,” Pollack added.
Joe Baker, president of the nonprofit Medicare Rights Center spoke in favor of the President’s health care plan and its anticipated impacts on Medicare.
“Through various reforms to Medicare, the health reform law helps to extend the Medicare trust fund by twelve years and it could help control costs even more significantly if implemented correctly,” Baker said.
“Additionally, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the Affordable Care Act will actually reduce the federal deficit over ten years,” Baker added.
House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-IN) released a statement defending the repeal of health care reform. “Some say we made history. I say we broke history as we turned our back on our finest traditions of limited government, personal responsibility and the consent of the governed,” Pence said.
“We can reform medicine without putting our country on a pathway to socialized medicine and Republicans are committed to that cause,” he added.
Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, criticized the passage of the ACA, saying, “The health care bill not only was a bad product but it was concocted by a bad process in locked rooms in the middle of the night with people having never read over 2,300 pages of the most massive policy that has ever been concocted and pushed on the American people.”
Addison Barry Rand of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) sent a letter to Congress in advance of the vote saying, “While we respect that there are those who do not support the ACA, AARP opposes repeal because the new law includes many vital provisions important to older Americans and their children.”
Rand said that AARP has learned through polls and outreach that older Americans support the ACA’s increase in preventative services and changes to Medicare, which include closing the “doughnut hole” coverage gap.
When the bill moved to the Senate in early February, proponents of repeal failed to get the 60 votes necessary for passage, earning only 47 to the opposition’s 51 votes.
This article was published in the March 2011 issue of Able News.
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