GOP Planning To Repeal Obama's Health Care Legislation?

Will The GOP Promise To Repeal "ObamaCare" If Returned To Power?


ABC News’ Teddy Davis reports: If health-care legislation makes it through Congress and is signed into law by President Obama, Republicans are going to face a big choice between accommodation and repudiation.

The GOP will have to decide in the years ahead if it wants to accept the program with minor modifications or whether it wants to try to dismantle it.

Although Republican senators have been extremely united in their opposition to Obama’s health-care overhaul as it has moved through the legislative process, it is not yet clear how the GOP will approach the “repeal” question if the president’s top domestic priority makes it into law.

The GOP’s uncertainty on this issue was evidenced on Wednesday by Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming.

Barrasso, a leading Republican voice on health-care reform who is one of only two U.S. senators who has practiced medicine, sidestepped the repeal question twice while appearing on ABCNews.com’s “Top Line.”

Asked if he wants Republican Senate candidates to advocate repeal in 2010, Barrasso called the bill an “historic mistake” for the country but did not say whether Republicans should promise to dismantle the program if voters were to return them to power in Congress.

“”You used a word earlier that it’s going to be an ‘historic’ vote, and I think it’s going to be a historic mistake for the country if this is what happens to health care,” said Barrasso. “Now, as you know, the changes don’t actually go into place until four years from now so people aren’t going to be able to see immediately what the problems are.

But they are going to notice the cuts in Medicare and, specifically, the increased taxes which go into effect the day that this bill is signed into law.”

Asked a second time if he wants Republicans to campaign on a “repeal” message in 2010, Barrasso once again dodged the question and instead voiced his concern about the federal budget deficit.

“The message should be ‘the debt is the threat,’” said Barrasso. “That is the problem with our nation right now.”

Appearing on ABC’s “Top Line” after Barrasso, Politico’s Jonathan Martin predicted that Republicans would divide on the repeal question in next year’s midterm elections.

“I think you’re going to see a split in the party on it,” said Martin. “There certainly are going to be some elements that are emphatically campaigning on a repeal but I think that’s probably not going to be a part of the party platform because there are going to be some who don’t want to be tagged with that ‘party of no’ rap.

They’re going to want to be the ‘party of reform ‘-- ‘let’s improve it.’ Now, that said, in some places in this country, certainly Red States -- places like Wyoming come to mind -- an out-and-out campaign of ‘let’s repeal it’ will certainly play well.”

Appearing on ABC’s “Top Line” from Capitol Hill, Barrasso sharply criticized Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, saying that the Nevada Democrat has stifled debate on the Senate floor.

“I brought 19 amendments to improve it and I didn’t even get a chance to offer them after Harry Reid brought his 383-page amendment and said, ‘this is it, take it or leave it,’” said Barrasso.

Barrasso, who brought four of his 19 amendments to the floor on Sunday, would not say if he would be voting for final passage even if they had been adopted.

Democrats tightly controlled the offering of amendments because they concluded that Republicans, who favor a radically different, mandate-free approach to health care, were more interested in stopping Obama’s overhaul than in winning passage of minor modifications.

With the Senate scheduled to vote on health-care reform at 8:00 am ET on Christmas Eve, Barrasso suggested that Democratic members of Congress should talk to their constituents about health-care reform during the holiday break.

“Now is the time for Americans all across this country to go face-to-face with their members of Congress . . . to say, "If this bill does pass the Senate, that they should vote against it in the House’ . . . because it does increase taxes, it does cut Medicare by huge amounts, and it’s going to cause … premiums to go up."



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Sources: ABC News, Senate Doctors Show, C-Span, AP, Youtube, Google Maps

Chris Matthews Agrees With "Death Panels Rationing" Theory? Sort Of...

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Sarah Palin: Midnight Votes, Backroom Deals, and a Death Panel



Last weekend while you were preparing for the holidays with your family, Harry Reid’s Senate was making shady backroom deals to ram through the Democrat health care take-over.

The Senate ended debate on this bill without even reading it. That and midnight weekend votes seem to be standard operating procedures in D.C.

No one is certain of what’s in the bill, but Senator Jim DeMint spotted one shocking revelation regarding the section in the bill describing the Independent Medicare Advisory Board (now called the Independent Payment Advisory Board), which is a panel of bureaucrats charged with cutting health care costs on the backs of patients – also known as Rationing.





Apparently Reid and friends have changed the rules of the Senate so that the section of the bill dealing with this board can’t be repealed or amended without a 2/3 super majority vote.

Senator DeMint said:

“This is a rule change.

It’s a pretty big deal. We will be passing a new law and at the same time creating a senate rule that makes it out of order to amend or even repeal the law. I’m not even sure that it’s constitutional, but if it is, it most certainly is a senate rule. I don’t see why the majority party wouldn’t put this in every bill.

If you like your law, you most certainly would want it to have force for future senates. I mean, we want to bind future congresses. This goes to the fundamental purpose of senate rules: to prevent a tyrannical majority from trampling the rights of the minority or of future congresses.”

In other words, Democrats are protecting this rationing “death panel” from future change with a procedural hurdle. You have to ask why they’re so concerned about protecting this particular provision. Could it be because bureaucratic rationing is one important way Democrats want to “bend the cost curve” and keep health care spending down?

The Congressional Budget Office seems to think that such rationing has something to do with cost. In a letter to Harry Reid last week, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf noted (with a number of caveats) that the bill’s calculations call for a reduction in Medicare’s spending rate by about 2 percent in the next two decades, but then he writes the kicker:

“It is unclear whether such a reduction in the growth rate could be achieved, and if so, whether it would be accomplished through greater efficiencies in the delivery of health care or would reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care.”

Though Nancy Pelosi and friends have tried to call “death panels” the “lie of the year,” this type of rationing – what the CBO calls “reduc[ed] access to care” and “diminish[ed] quality of care” – is precisely what I meant when I used that metaphor.

This health care bill is one of the most far-reaching and expensive expansions of the role of government into our lives. We’re talking about putting one-seventh of our economy under the government’s thumb. We’re also talking about something as intimate to our personal well-being as medical care.

This bill is so unpopular that people on the right and the left hate it. So why go through with it? The Senate is planning to vote on this on Christmas Eve. Why the rush? Though we will begin paying for this bill immediately, we will see no benefits for years. (That’s the trick that allowed the CBO to state that the bill won’t grow the deficit for the next ten years.)

The administration’s promises of transparency and bipartisanship have been broken one by one. This entire process has been defined by midnight votes on weekends, closed-door meetings with industry lobbyists, and payoffs to politicians willing to sell their principles for sweetheart deals. Is it any wonder that Americans are so disillusioned with their leaders in Washington?

This is about politics, not health care. Americans don’t want this bill.

Americans don’t like this bill. Washington has stopped listening to us. But we’re paying attention, and 2010 is coming.

- Sarah Palin



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Sources: MSNBC, Hardball, Media Matters, Red State, Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, CBO, Facebook, Fox News, Google Maps