Looks like Republicans in Congress have now been relegated to a status once reserved for kidnappers and terrorists. The President has said he will not negotiate with them.
He would rather shut down the legislative process and risk government default than discuss his differences with Congress. Formerly, when the House had differences with the President or the Senate there would be negotiations in which each side would compromise to create legislation they could all support. But not now.
His description in a speech on Saturday is an example of his unprecedented political attack mode. He said that the House bill on funding the government would cause the government to “default for the first time in United States history,” even though the bill is designed specifically to not do that and will pay for all of government except for the additional expenses of implementing ObamaCare.
Of course a Presidential veto is nothing new, but there is much more at work here. Senator Majority leader Harry Reid is blocking the legislative process in his determination not to let a bill such as the House has passed even be considered on the floor of the Senate, or even in committee. And he continues to falsely describe those who want to bring sanity to government spending as “anarchists” who are opposed to the very existence of a government.
The reason the House is opposed to ObamaCare is not, as the President says, because Republicans do not want to “make sure that everybody has affordable health care.”
A couple of the many reasons why Republicans are opposed to it are:
the damage it will do to the best health care system in the world;
the outrageous cost of ObamaCare. It is estimated now that the costs are already double what it was originally said to cost.
Despite the President’s rhetoric that ObamaCare will give us “affordable health care,” it is not written to, and is not intended to, give us all affordable health care. It was supposed to provide everyone with health insurance, something it turns out, it really won’t do either.
The health care industry, while it by no means needs “fundamental transformation,” certainly has areas that need to be fixed. For example, we do need to find ways to bring costs under control and to deal with an impending disastrous shortage of doctors.
It’s amazing that legislation that overhauls the health insurance industry and medical entitlements doesn’t even begin to address the primary things the federal government needs to do to help the health care industry.
So far, what the 1200 pages of ObamaCare legislation have done is produce thousands of new federal regulations, gotten a very partisan IRS more involved in our lives, and added multiplied new layers of bureaucracy to the federal government. It’s time for this to stop.
Rolf Yungclas is a recently retired newspaper editor from southwest Kansas who has been speaking out on the issues of the day in newspapers and online for over 15 years
