The ED Show – Republicans to vote on healthcare repeal for 31st time

July 10, 2012
Republicans in the House are poised to repeal the Affordable Care Act Wednesday. It will be this congress’ 31st vote to either dismantle or outright repeal Affordable Care. Speaker Boehner insists Americans want the GOP to keep trying to repeal health care reform. But the latest polls show he’s just flat out wrong. Ed Schultz talks to Congressman Steve Israel of New York and Chairman Of The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee about why the Republicans are so determined to keep President Obama from helping middle-class Americans.
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“I thank the Gentleman for yielding. What a perfect bill this is. Our Republican friends don’t like taxes. They don’t like the collection of taxes, and, of course, none of us do. And they don’t like affordable care for our citizens, quality care for our citizens, accessible care for our citizens. So with this stroke, they can attack both.

“The Gentleman that just spoke asserts that the American people know. The Republicans have made an assertion about the oversight of taxpayers, to see whether or not they are committing fraud, i.e., claiming to be social welfare organizations, when everybody in America knows they are solely political organizations. And the Republicans never mention it was across the board, not targeted. And the Affordable Care Act, they don’t like that either. They would, as my friend from Texas says, still like to have the insurance companies in charge — not the patient, not the doctor, but the insurance companies.

“Mr. Speaker, less than two weeks ago Republicans were on this Floor for the 38th and 39th time to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The accessible care Act, the quality care Act. Now we have the 40th time we’ve been at this. The American people of course want to see us working on jobs. They want to see us working on investment and education. They want to see us being able to compete with the world. But what do we do? We continue to beat this horse. And contrary to my Republican friends’ assertions, Americans say overwhelmingly when asked, ‘do you want repeal or do you want a fix?’ — make it better, do things better, make it more efficient — they opt for the latter overwhelmingly.

“But as the Gentleman from Texas just said, you go to the website and that’s two-and-a-half years. Not two and a half years, I tell my friend from Texas. It’s been seven years, since 2006, when we started working on this. But there’s no fix. No fix on the website. No fix on this Floor.

“Today their new found populism is nowhere to be seen, as they vote to repeal tax credits and subsidies designed to make health care more affordable for those same people: working families and small businesses who haven’t been able to get insurance and are left at risk without the security of it. Suddenly, the party that never met a tax break it didn’t like is pursuing a tax increase of more than trillion on small businesses and the middle class. As a result, they are making health care more expensive, and millions of Americans will no longer be able to access affordable health care.

“Mr. Speaker, this bill makes all those folks pawns in Republicans’ single-focused quest to undo health care reform at the expense of every other pressing challenge we face as a nation. It’s shameful, Mr. Speaker, that this House continues to waste the American people’s time on health care repeal votes that won’t go anywhere, and they know it. The Senate will not pass this bill, and the President will not sign it.

“We have pressing business before us that needs immediate attention — finishing appropriation bills, completing our work on the budget that provides a balanced alternative to the sequester, ensuring America can pay its bills, and taking action to create jobs — that’s what we ought to be doing, not this continued foolishness. And I yield back the balance of my time.”
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