Today, the House of Representatives has, once again, voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. This is the thirty-third time that the House of Representatives has voted to repeal all, or portions of, the ACA. Nothing will change as a result of this vote unless the Senate also votes for it, and that is unlikely to happen.
This pattern keeps repeating. The Republican-led House of Representatives keeps creating bills that are designed to repeal all, or part of, the Affordable Care Act. The House of Representatives has a majority of Republicans right now, and since the Republican party wants to repeal the ACA, these bills end up being voted into a law. Or, rather, what could, potentially, become a law if the Senate decided to vote the same way.
The Senate is Democratic-led right now, and so, these bills end up dying after reaching the Senate. The Democrats want to see the Affordable Care Act continue to be enacted. If, for some reason, the Senate chose to vote the same way on one of these bills as the House of Representatives did, it still wouldn’t automatically become a law. Before a bill can be made into law, it has to be signed by the President. It is clear that President Obama is not going to sign a bill that would repeal the ACA.
Today, the House of Representatives voted, for the thirty-third time, on a bill that would repeal the Affordable Care Act. This time, the vote was 244 to 185. All of the Republican members of the House voted for it, and so did five members who are Democrats.
This time around, Democrats in the House attempted to attach a provision to this bill before it was voted on. The provision would require lawmakers to surrender their own taxpayer subsidized federal health insurance benefits. House Republicans refused to allow this provision to be added to the bill.
The Leader of the House of Representatives is Eric Cantor, who is a Republican. He said:
“This is a law that the American people did not want when it was passed and it remains a law that the American people do not want now”.
Kaiser Family Foundation did a survey shortly after the Supreme Court decided that the Affordable Care Act was constitutional. The survey showed that 51% of people who are Independents, and 82% of people who are Democrats, believe that the Republican representatives should move on to other issues. A total of 69% of people who are Republican said they want to see more efforts made to repeal the ACA.
Representative Jim McDermott, who is a Democrat, had something interesting to say about the Republicans repeated efforts to pass the same type of bill, thirty-three times over. He said:
“As a psychiatrist, I’m qualified to say this: One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”.
Image by Phil Roeder on Flickr