December 04, 2015
"to elevate the condition of men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life." --Abraham Lincoln
Chairman's Note: Sending Obamacare Repeal to
President's Desk
Nearly six years ago the Senate was on the verge of passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. This week, we voted to repeal that insultingly misnamed law.
Back in the winter of 2009, of course, we still had yet to pass the bill to see what was in it – though you didn’t need a PhD in economics to foresee that the Affordable Care Act would be a mess.
It wasn’t just conservatives and Republicans raising concerns. Every sensible observer saw the obvious flaws and inevitable disasters embedded in the rickety, ideological scheme congressional Democrats were foisting on the American people in an exercise of unprecedented partisanship.
Six years later, the Democratic Party’s dream of Obamacare has become the American people’s nightmare.
For the past five years, the American people have lived with – and suffered through – the chaos and dysfunction wrought by Obamacare’s assault on American health care. And at every step along the way, opposition to the law has grown stronger and calls for its repeal have grown louder.
Which brought us to this week’s vote in the Senate.
Last year, Republicans running for Congress promised to repeal Obamacare as a first step toward replacing it with real health care and insurance reform.
And it was largely on the basis of this pledge that the American people put the G.O.P. in charge of both the House and the Senate.
The bill that the Senate passed this week brings us as close to fulfilling that promise as is possible under Senate rules, pursuant to the instructions from the budget resolution that Congress passed a few months ago.
I applaud the Majority Leader for his steadfast leadership over the past several days and weeks, and I commend the Senate Budget Committee for their tireless efforts, as Republicans worked together to craft a reconciliation package that doesn’t just tinker around Obamacare’s edges, but lays the ground work for it to be erased from the books altogether.
This is the only responsible step for Congress to take – because by the law’s own standards – according to the promises of the ideologues who imposed it on an unwilling country – Obamacare has been a failure.
But saying “no” is not enough. Conservatives and Republicans must also offer the country a health-care reform agenda to be for.
Already there are a number of conservative leaders in Congress who have developed reform plans that would replace Obamacare’s cumbersome, bureaucratic, and expensive health system with one that is flexible, decentralized, and affordable.
We must build on these plans and advance legislation that empowers patients and families – not distant, coercive bureaucracies – to decide how they want to spend their health care dollars, and that encourages innovation and investment across all health sectors.
Repealing the Affordable Care Act is the first step in that process – the beginning, not the end, of our road to building a market-based, patient-centered health system in America.
I was glad to join my colleagues in voting to repeal Obamacare and I look forward to entering this new phase of health reform together.
Issue in Focus: Two Steps Forward and One Step Back
The Senate this week took two steps forward and one step back.
On Thursday evening, a Republican majority passed an historic budget reconciliation package designed to relieve American families, workers, and businesses from the most onerous and costly provisions of Obamacare. Shortly thereafter, a bipartisan majority passed a federal highway bill designed to satisfy the demands of K Street lobbyists and federal regulators, while imposing on the rest of America the same ineffective, overpriced federal highway policy that has failed to meet our infrastructure needs for decades.
Just as objectionable as the discredited substance of the legislation are the bill’s irresponsible and unsustainable funding mechanisms and the cynical process that produced it.
Of the $70 billion this bill uses to bailout the Highway Trust Fund over the next five years, more than $50 billion comes from an accounting gimmick that steals money from the rest of the Treasury’s general fund. The bill also purports to raises $6.2 billion in revenue for transportation and infrastructure projects by selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve – assuming a price of $93 for a barrel of oil, even though it’s currently selling for less than $40 per barrel.
If we’re going to start selling federal assets at fantasy prices, there is no limit to the number of things we can pretend to pay for.
But as bad as the bill’s funding schemes are, the cynical process used to secure votes in its favor is even more troubling.
For instance, this bill adds back $3.5 billion in crop-subsidy spending that we cut just last week in the budget deal. Is this really how we do business in the United States Senate? Reduce spending one week in order to appear fiscally responsible, only to reverse course the very next week when nobody is expecting it? You don’t need to oppose crop subsidies to see the dishonesty and cynicism of this maneuver.
Even worse, this bill would not have a chance of passing the Senate were it not for a deal to include a renewal of the Export-Import Bank.
There’s little need to revisit the mountain of evidence proving that the Export-Import Bank is one of the most egregious, indefensible cases of crony capitalism in Washington, D.C. But it is worth highlighting some of the so-called “reforms” that Ex-Im’s supporters included in the bill.
First, there’s the new “Office of Ethics” created within the Bank. Presumably this is supposed to help the Bank’s management reduce the rate at which Ex-Im employees and beneficiaries are indicted for fraud, bribery, and other wrongdoings. Since 2009, there have been 85 such indictments – or about 14 per year.
The bill also creates a new position – called the “Chief Risk Officer” – and requires the Bank to go through an independent audit of its portfolio.
Only in Washington will you find people who believe that an organization’s systemic ethical failings can be overcome by creating a new “ethics” bureaucracy… or that hiring a new a risk-management bureaucrat is a suitable replacement for market discipline… or that giving another multi-million-dollar contract to a well connected accounting firm will substitute for real political accountability.
Finally, this bill does nothing to fix our fundamentally broken highway financing system, which makes it harder and more expensive for state and local policymakers to meet the transportation needs of their communities.
Under the status quo system, federal bureaucrats divert at least 25 percent the states’ gas tax dollars to non-highway projects, including mass transit, bike paths, and other boondoggles like “vegetation management.” Federal Davis Bacon price-fixing regulations artificially inflate construction costs by at least 10 percent. And federal environmental regulations, like those issued under the National Environmental Policy Act, add an average of 6.1 years in planning delays to any federally funded project.
We can have honest disagreements over policy, but we must not continue to tolerate the kind of corrupt process that produced this bill – the backroom deals, the about-face on crop subsidies and the Export-Import Bank.
The American people deserve better than this. And it’s up to the Republican majority in Congress to ensure that we will do better than this in the future.
