Reuters reports, “The two top Republicans in Congress vowed on Sunday to push ahead with efforts to repeal President Barack Obama’s healthcare law despite the Supreme Court upholding it, but the White House said it is time to stop fighting and start implementing it. ‘This has to be ripped out by its roots,’ House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, the top Republican in Congress, said of the 2010 law on the CBS program ‘Face the Nation.’ Boehner added: ‘We will not flinch from our resolve to make sure this law is repealed in its entirety.’ The House, controlled by Republicans, has scheduled a vote on July 11 to repeal the law. The Democratic-led Senate, as it has done in the past, is certain to block any repeal legislation.”
The Reuters piece adds, “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Republicans will insist that the Democrats who control the chamber hold a vote before the election on repealing the law. ‘If I’m the leader of the majority next year, I commit to the American people that the repeal of “Obamacare” will be job one,’ he said on ‘Fox News Sunday.’ . . . ‘This is the single worst piece of legislation that’s been passed, certainly in modern times. And it will be an issue, a big issue, in the fall election,’ McConnell said. ‘We’ve got one last chance here to defeat Obamacare. We can do that in the November election,’ added McConnell.”
Leader McConnell told Fox’s Chris Wallace, “The President said [the individual mandate] was not a tax and the Supreme Court which has the final say said it is a tax. The tax is going to be levied, 77 percent of it will be levied on Americans making less than $120,000 a year. So it’s a middle class tax increase. Beyond that, Chris, the core of the bill it is worth reminding people is a half a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicare – that’s hospitals, nursing homes, home health care and the like, and a $500 billion tax increase. The Congressional Budget Office said it is also a job killer. It will cost the economy between 800,000 and a million jobs.”
He emphasized, “The single best thing we could do for the American health care system is to get rid of Obamacare, get rid of the half a trillion dollars in Medicare cuts, get rid of the half a trillion dollars in taxes. In other words, the single biggest step we could take in the direction of improving American health care is to get rid of this monstrosity.”
