Rep. John Barrow has written an editorial in the Savannah Morning News explaining why he cast a vote against ObamaCare last Friday evening:
The bill does not do enough to bring health care costs under control, and it puts too much of the cost of covering the uninsured on the backs of people who are already paying for their own insurance. It also puts too much on the backs of small businesses that can’t afford it.
We also don’t know how much this plan is going to cost. The Congressional Budget Office was not able to score the bill in time for the vote. As a true fiscal conservative, I could not vote for a program this big without the best estimate of how much it will cost. That also makes it harder to figure out how we’re going to pay for it. In the end, reform we can’t afford to pay for is reform that can’t realistically happen.
These are all reasons why I think it was not wise to rush this bill through the markup process just to get it done before the August District Work Period. The committee, and the whole country, would have benefited from another month to read the entire bill, understand its ramifications, and make the bill better. In the rush to produce something before we left town, we didn’t even have time to vote on all of the offered amendments. Instead, we’ll vote on the remaining 60 or so amendments when we get back in September, which is when we should have continued working on the bill in its entirety. I can’t understand voting on a bill that will be changed by amendments that hadn’t been voted on yet.
There are a few things there that I disagree with, but if “reform we can’t afford to pay for is reform that can’t realistically happen,” shouldn’t we completely take expansion of government involvement of health care be completely off the table considering our already massive national debt and unfunded liabilities? Just a thought.
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