House votes to repeal health care reform
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) standing before the chamber. The House voted to repeal the health care reform law.
(Photo courtesy of the federal government)
The House has voted to repeal the health care reform law, two weeks after it was upheld by the Supreme Court. The vote was 244-185, according to a report from NPR.
The legislation is not likely to go beyond the Senate, where Democrats have the majority. In remarks on the House floor, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said the bill should go away. “We are resolved to have this law go away, and we’re going to do everything we can to stop it,” Boehner said according to a report from the British newspaper The Guardian. Republicans have said that the law is threatening the economy, while Democrats have said that many protections that have been listed in the law would be removed, according to a report from the Associated Press quoted by NPR.
House Democrat Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) said according to The Guardian that this had been a “useless bill to nowhere”. House Republican Leader Eric Cantor said the bill still remained unpopular. “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,” Cantor said according to The Guardian. “Obamacare takes away from patients the ability to make their own decisions and individual choices.”
Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (D-California) said Republicans had not accepted that they had lost when it came to the issue of the health care law, quoting Shakespeare in remarks on the House floor. “Thou dost protest too much,” Eshoo said according to The Guardian. “The chief justice and four other justices of the supreme court of our land have upheld the law for health care accessibility for every single American, and what do the Republicans do but come to repeal?”