Obamacare has floundered out of the gates, but Republicans won't capitalize on a potential failure of the Affordable Care Act unless they present real alternatives to voters, Sen. Mike Lee says.
"What we need is a reform measure that we can all [get] behind that will allow people to carry their insurance policy with them when they move from state to state, when they move from job to job, and we need to do this through a series of incentives involving the tax code.
"Some of them would call for tax deductions, others would call for tax credits," the Utah Republican told J.D. Hayworth, ex-Rep. Allen West and John Bachman on "America's Forum" on Newsmax TV on Tuesday.
"But one way or another we can get there, but we need to do it in such a way that leaves Americans in charge of their own health care decisions rather than have those decisions made for them by government bureaucrats in Washington."
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Lee said that President Barack Obama's celebration of hitting the 7 million threshold for health insurance enrollees through the ACA by March 31 was misleading because most of those people were previously covered.
"What he's doing is repeating numbers in a way that's really quite misleading to the American people, makes it sound like this law is a success when in fact it has cost Americans a lot of money, it's cost a lot of Americans jobs, it's cost a lot of Americans access to healthcare providers, insurance companies, doctors that they have come to trust over the years, and it's making health insurance more expensive rather than less," Lee said.
"All of this is happening at the same time that we're not seeing a dramatic increase in the number of people who are getting insured for the first time," he said.
As troubling to Lee as the problems with Obamacare are the many tweaks that have been made to the ACA that weren't authorized by Congress.
"We have the president changing this law dozens and dozens of times by the stroke of the executive pen even though he doesn't have the authority to do that. You have the Supreme Court that rewrote the law, not just once but twice in order to save it from an otherwise inevitable finding of unconstitutionality. That, too, is wrong," Lee said.
"The American people are starting to recognize the fact that they're being hurt by this law and that this law has caused them to become the victims of various constitutional violations."
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