Johnson, Brady, and Marchant, Fellow Republicans Hold Hearing to Get to Bottom of Obamacare Implementation Glitches … As If They Didn’t Spend the Last Four Years Trying to Sabotage the Health Law and Leave Millions of Americans With No Affordable Insurance Options At All
Texas Insider Report: Washington DC – U.S. Reps. Sam Johnson (R-TX-3), Kevin Brady (R-TX-8), Kenny Marchant (R-TX-24) and Republicans in Congress must think the American people have the memory of a goldfish – that the public would forget that Republicans shut down the government less than a month ago in their most brazen and costly attempt to kill or cripple the Affordable Care Act to date. But now Republicans on the House Committee on Ways and Means including Reps. Sam Johnson (R-TX-3), Kevin Brady (R-TX-8), and Kenny Marchant (R-TX-24) expect the public to believe they suddenly care about the plight of the uninsured by holding a public hearing today on the “problems Americans are experiencing with the Obama Administration’s launch of the Affordable Care Act.
These “concerns” don’t pass the laugh test. Republicans like Congressmen Johnson, Brady and Marchant have zero credibility complaining about implementation glitches when they opposed the Affordable Care Act at its inception, have done everything in their power to delay, repeal, defund the law every day since, have repeatedly blocked funding needed for implementation, and whose entire health plan is to let the insurance companies go back to denying coverage to millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions and dropping people when they get sick.
Brad Woodhouse, President, Americans United for Change: “It’s really rich for Republicans to be shedding crocodile tears over the glitches in the ACA website when they have done nothing for four years but try to impede, repeal and defund the law and root for its failure. After voting repeatedly to leave uninsured Americans with no affordable coverage options at all and to leave insured Americans susceptible again to the worst insurance industry practices, are we really to believe Congressmen Johnson, Brady and Marchant give a spit that Americans are having trouble enrolling in a health plan? This is a transparent attempt by Republicans to score political points around road bumps in the health law’s implementation and distract from the fact that they just left 120,000 Americans without jobs by shutting down the government in the name of Obamacare. It’s not fooling anyone, and it takes a lot of nerve. If Congressmen Johnson, Brady and Marchant were truly concerned about how smoothly the health law’s implementation is going, he would stop throwing monkey wrenches into the process every chance he gets. You could call what Tiberi and Renacci and the Republicans are engaging in hypocrisy but that would be an insult to hypocrites.
“The GOP’s phony ‘concerns’ notwithstanding, we have every confidence that the administration’s tech surge under way will fix what needs fixing and open up the doors for even more uninsured Americans to finally get the affordable, quality care they deserve,” added Woodhouse. “Of course, the website glitches don’t effect the majority of Americans who already have insurance. They still have the peace of mind knowing that ACA’s new benefits and consumer protections from insurance industry abuse has added many layers to their health security.”
