Recently, a $940 billion spending bill that will impose higher taxes and mandates on families and businesses passed through Congress and was signed into law by President Obama. The health care bill was touted as a “historic” effort toward comprehensive reform, yet all the bill does is increase spending, expand government control, raise insurance premiums, and diminish the quality and accessibility of care.
According to the Heritage Foundation, the federal health care bill will increase spending by $234 billion, raise insurance premiums by 10 to 16 percent and put one-fifth of all health care providers at risk of bankruptcy. It will also replace competition and innovation, which have built our health care industry into the world-class industry it is today, with government bureaucracy and red tape.
In other words, this legislation as passed has the potential to destroy the economy and collapse the quality of our nation’s health care.
Here in Ohio, the effects of this bill will hit families and businesses hard. With the state having already suffered months and months of double-digit unemployment, small businesses may terminate even more jobs when they cannot afford the higher costs mandated by Washington. Patient care will likely suffer significantly, as benefits and costs will now be controlled by the political elites.
Most disturbing is the provision that ALL Americans will be forced to purchase health care insurance, a mandate that intercepts individual freedom and will impose a heavier financial burden on already-struggling families. The people of Ohio cannot afford this pricey new mandate in the face of the $8 billion deficit we will be forced to reckon with in the next budget. To enforce this mandate, the federal government is hiring an additional 16,000 IRS agents who will have the authority to check your income tax return for compliance with the new law.
To preserve the rights of Ohioans to make their own health care decisions, I cosponsored House Joint Resolution 3, also known as the Ohio Health Care Freedom Act, which would safeguard the fundamental liberties of Ohio’s citizens. However, since its introduction in October, this measure has only received sponsor testimony in committee and has sat idle for months during the most critical time in our state’s history.
In a second attempt to pass legislation that would protect Ohio’s families, House Republicans will soon be introducing a bill to declare that it is the state’s policy that its citizens are not required to buy into a particular health insurance policy, whether it is private, state or federal. It would also protect individuals from paying any penalties for exercising this right, while requiring the Ohio Attorney General to file an injunction against any mandate that disrespects the state’s policies.
All Americans would have benefitted from a bipartisan compromise that blended the best ideas of both parties. Instead, what we got was a flawed bill that passed merely through political muscle and circumvented a fair democratic process. Ohio’s lawmakers must work to improve health care affordability and accessibility for all citizens without bankrupting the state and killing more jobs in the process.