Gainsville Times - Collins: All of Obamacare Must be Repealed

Op-Ed

By Rep Douglas Collins

This week, I have my first opportunity to cast a vote to repeal Obamacare. While I have been working to stop Obamacare since I came to Congress, including my efforts to pass the Defund Obamacare Act with fellow Georgia Rep. Tom Graves, I'm looking forward to fulfilling my promise to support full repeal on the House floor.

Now is a critical time to reconsider Obamacare. Our nation's fragile economy cannot sustain the incredible burden of Obamacare, including its $1 trillion tax hike and estimated 127 million hours of regulatory compliance. The administration has released a mind-boggling 20,000 pages of regulations mandated by Obamacare, including 828 pages during a single day earlier this year. Businesses already struggling to maintain or create jobs are wasting precious resources just to determine what Obamacare means for their company.

Obamacare's authors have recently bemoaned the lack of public awareness concerning the law's implementation. Polls have indicated that a majority of Americans simply don't know what impact Obamacare will have on their family's health care. But these Washington politicians only have themselves to blame. If the members of Congress who supported Obamacare didn't have time to read approximately 2,000 pages of bill text before they voted on it, how on earth do they expect American families and business owners to read 20,000 pages of bureaucrat-written regulations?

The administration has a familiar solution for this public awareness problem: spending more of your hard-earned tax dollars. the Department of Health and Human Services announced earlier this month that it will spend $150 million teaching people how to enroll in the Obamacare-mandated exchanges due to open this fall.

That's right, in the era of sequestration, the president can't find a way to keep the White House open to the public, but his administration can spend your money on further efforts to promote his signature law.

If all that taxpayer money doesn't work, there is a backup plan. During an interview, retiring U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, one of Obamacare's champions, was asked how difficult it will be to "reach people and make sure they sign up" for the exchanges. One of his responses? "I think word of mouth is going to be a savior."

Sen. Rockefeller has cited Obamacare as "probably the most complex piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress." He said Obamacare is "so complicated and if it isn't done right the first time, it will just simply get worse."

But in the face of a tidal wave of regulations, a proliferation of misinformation on the Internet, and a public that admits it doesn't understand exactly what Obamacare does, architects of the bill think that "word of mouth" will ensure smooth implementation.

The president and his allies in Congress have always known implementation would be complicated. After all, Obamacare is largely composed of authorizations for various agencies to issue thousands of regulations. At its core, the health care law wasn't so much an act of Congress as a broadening of regulatory authority at HHS and the Internal Revenue Service. Washington cannot blame the American people for the law's inevitable failure.

The call to repeal Obamacare will only grow louder as its heavy-handed regulations and higher costs begin impacting American workers who are already struggling to make ends meet. Polling on the health care law reveals a public that remains highly skeptical of Obamacare. In one recent survey, twice as many respondents said they expected to be worse off as a result of the bill compared with those who said they would be better off. Twenty-five percent said the law wasn't likely to make much difference in their lives. Public opinion on the law will decline as more folks see that Obamacare puts government, not patients, first.

Half a year before full implementation, Obamacare is already creating problems the president is spending your tax dollar to fix. That's just one of the reasons I'm voting to repeal Obamacare.

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