Westmoreland Votes to Repeal ObamaCare

Congressman Lynn Westmoreland joined his colleagues today to vote to strike down the job-killing ObamaCare legislation passed during the last Congress. The controversial legislation squeaked by Congress early last year, much to the chagrin of the American people. According to a recent Washington Post poll, 59% of Americans oppose the law. Below is Congressman Westmoreland’s statement.

“ObamaCare is bad policy, crafted using bad procedure. It was passed against the will of the majority of Americans, and is one of the main reasons Democrats saw massive defeats at the polls in November. There are currently 26 states challenging ObamaCare in court. We have already seen some success in federal court, including in Virginia where a judge ruled that individual mandates were unconstitutional. However, Congress must do its part to put an end to this job-destroying law that places federal bureaucrats between patients and their doctors. That’s why I am proud to announce that I joined a bipartisan group of my colleagues in the House today and voted to repeal Obamacare.

“Congressional Democrats and the White House cooked the books on ObamaCare, using accounting gimmicks; one of which was charging 10 years of and only havin 6 years of spending. Any practical assessment of ObamaCare shows it costing 2.6 trillion dollars and increasing the deficit by 701 billion dollars over the next ten years. And believe it or not, it might actually get worse – when Medicare was created in 1965, they projected the cost would be 12 billion dollars in 1990. But in actuality, the cost in 1990 was 96 billion dollars – an 800 percent increase over the projections.

“We need real reform in this country that will address the problems within our health care system, while decreasing costs – not increasing costs like ObamaCare does. Now that we have voted to repeal, the committees of jurisdiction will take the next several months to hold hearings and draft legislation to replace this harmful law with real reforms. The vote today will not be an overnight solution and much must still be done. However, it is a step in the right direction,” stated Westmoreland.