On January 19, 2011, Republicans took the first steps in reigning in Washington’s reckless spending spree by rolling back the fiscally irresponsible health care law. Businesses, policy experts, and government actuaries have confirmed what the country already knew: this law spends trillions of dollars that we don’t have, raises taxes on workers, businesses and families, and puts the federal government squarely in the middle of health-care decisions. 

Budgetary smoke and mirrors were used to claim this plan would reduce the deficit. The law relies on 10 years of tax increases to pay for six years of new spending. It double-counts more than $520 billion as both spending cuts and payments to beneficiaries and ignores $208 billion needed to avert cuts to Medicare physicians. Even the $115 billion in implementation costs are hidden behind budgetary gimmicks and Washington-style accounting rules.

In addition to its impact on the deficit, the health care law is damaging to job creation and economic growth. Its dizzying maze of mandates and thousands of new regulations threaten to cripple businesses both large and small. The bill also hurts workers by encouraging employers to drop coverage and dump employees into a government-controlled exchange rather than pay the increased rates associated with new mandates in the bill.

The bill also contains more than $500 billion in new tax hikes on individuals and businesses. With the national unemployment rate at 9.4%, keeping a job-destroying, spend-and-tax law on the books would be irresponsible and would further diminish the prospects of a robust economic recovery. 

I raised these concerns with the President at the 2009 Blair House Summit and again when Congress took up the bill.  Since then, the Administration’s own Chief Actuary, along with a host of other independent studies, have raised many of the same concerns. A gimmick-free estimate from the House Budget Committee pegs the price tag of the health care law near $2.6 trillion when fully implemented, with $700 billion in new deficit spending. 

But as the House stands ready to undo this damage, some are crying afoul claiming this will in fact raise the deficit.  Only in Washington can repealing a massive new government-spending program be seen as adding to our fiscal problems. To be clear, the same budgetary gimmicks that were used to enact the health care law last year are still there. Nothing has changed.

All of this belies the point that our nation’s health care system is fundamentally broken. We spend more per capita on health care than any other developed nation, yet our health outcomes are worse. Republicans and Democrats both agree that the status quo in health care is unacceptable.  Congress must work diligently to improve the quality of care, lower costs, and slow the spiraling growth of programs already on the books. These are not new ideas, and I have been advocating for comprehensive patient-centered health care reform, the Patient’s Choice Act, since before the health care debate began in earnest. 

We cannot afford to tinker around the edges of this fundamentally flawed law.  Full repeal is a critical step towards true health care reform and I am glad Congress has started the process of fixing what is truly broken in health care.