Boxer: “Repealing Health Care Reform Will Hurt Our Country”

David Streeter — January 14, 2011 – 1:40 pm | Congress | Democrats | Health Care | Women's Issues Comments (0) Add a comment

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has written in The Huffington Post about the negative impact that the Republican Party’s plan to repeal last year’s health care reform legislation will have on all Americans. According to Boxer:

If the law is repealed, our seniors will lose. Under the law, nearly 450,000 California seniors, and 3.9 million seniors across the country, will get help with their prescription drug costs over the next decade - with an average savings of $9,000 for every senior. Our seniors can’t afford to lose those savings.

If the law is repealed, taxpayers will lose. Just this month, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that repealing health care reform would increase the deficit by $230 billion over the next ten years. And a Harvard economist recently estimated that repealing the health law could “destroy 250,000 to 400,000 jobs annually over the next decade.”

If this law is repealed, our small businesses will lose. Small businesses across the country will receive $40 billion in tax credits under the law over the next decade - and rescinding those credits would jeopardize their ability to cover their employees. In my home state of California, small businesses stand to receive $4.4 billion in tax relief.

If the law is repealed, consumers will lose. The health care reform law prevents insurance companies from dropping coverage when patients get sick. It also stops insurers from refusing to pay emergency room bills for people who go to a hospital outside their network. No one in the middle of a health care emergency should have to worry about calling their insurance company’s claims department rather than 9-1-1.

If the law is repealed, our families will lose. The legislation requires insurance companies to spend at least 80 percent of our premiums on health care - not on their profits. It requires all health plans to cover preventative health care - like mammograms and vaccines - at little or no cost. And it bars insurance companies from denying people care because they have reached an arbitrary “lifetime limit” on health care benefits.

Boxer concluded:

Preserving health care reform is the right thing to do because it will expand health care coverage to 32 million Americans, including millions of Californians.

Before this legislation passed, 45,000 people a year died - not because doctors didn’t know how to help them, but because they could not get access to health insurance to cover necessary treatments.

We cannot go back to a system that leaves so many of our citizens without access to life-saving care. Health care reform provides hope to families who have been let down by this broken system - hope that our country can do better.

Repealing health care reform would destroy this hope and put too many of our children, our seniors and our families at risk. I am absolutely willing to work across the aisle to make health care reform better, but repealing it would be an enormous mistake for the American people.

Click here to find out what you can do to help stop the Republican Party’s plan to repeal health care reform.

Comments

There are no comments for this entry