The House of Representatives vote to repeal President Barack Obama’s healthcare law is important even though it will ultimately fail in the Senate because it highlights again how bad Obamacare is for America, Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, tells Newsmax.TV.
Burgess, one of just a handful of medical doctors serving in Congress, said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will protect the president’s bill and the repeal measure will never reach Obama’s desk. However, with the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the constitutionality of the law, some are confused.
“The repeal votes gives us a chance to once again sharpen the focus on just how bad this thing is from start to finish,” he said. “The process that got it to the House floor in the first place was defective from the get go. You had all the secret meetings down at the White House with the lobbyists behind closed doors that actually wrote the health care law. You had then the Senate push out a rough draft on Christmas Eve. You had the House ratify the rough draft the following March and the President signed it into law.
“And then since then you’ve had episode after episode of rulemaking, of very draconian rules coming out of the Department of Health and Human Services. Look, if anybody thinks that this bill is anything to do Obama reforming health care, I hope they’re disabused of this notion now but the repeal vote on the floor today is one more chance to underscore, again, bad bill, bad process, bad law and, as a consequence, we put American freedom at risk, America’s fiscal future at risk and I’ll even go so far as to say the entire profession of medicine and the patients’ relationship with their doctor is all being put at risk.”
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Regardless, the vice chairman of the House subcommittee on health said should Mitt Romney win the White House and the GOP take the Senate, the measure will be ready to send to the new president in January.
“That would be my goal,” Burgess said. “Even if parts of it had to be repealed under reconciliation with 51 Republican Senators who would be available after the next Congress is sworn in … the Congress convenes the first week in January. The president is sworn in the third week in January and quite right, we could have a brand new bill on the president’s desk, ready for him to sign when he takes office.”
In addition to Obamacare’s negative effect on American and patients, the measure will also harm the medical profession.
“The notion that I had when I was in residency back in the 1970s was that I would be able to learn my craft, learn it well, go to a community, open an office, hang out a shingle, and go to work day one with minimal interference from the government. Those days are going to be gone,” Burgess said.
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