House GOP targets health law

By Emily Ethridge

As the new House Republican majority begins its attack on the health care overhaul with a largely symbolic vote, committee chairmen are planning oversight hearings that aides say will lead to more targeted legislation striking specific provisions.


Next week, the House will vote on a bill (HR 2) to repeal the overhaul (PL 111-148, PL 111-152), although the measure is unlikely to move beyond that chamber because Senate Democrats have pledged to block it and President Obama wields veto power.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs referred to the vote as “a bit of huff and puff.”

Still, Republicans hope the floor showdown will telegraph their commitment to dismantling the law, while setting the stage for a series of narrower — and likely less dramatic — efforts to block the law’s implementation piece by piece.

But there won’t be floor votes on those additional measures any time soon. GOP leadership aides say the next moves will be mainly committee oversight hearings that will help focus members on more rifle-shot repeal bills, and how best to block the law’s implementation through the appropriations process, the aides said.
Strategy Shift

“It’s a very big issue, it’s a complicated issue, and I expect there’ll be a lot of committee action in the area,” said Dave Camp of Michigan, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. He added that his panel would be “very active” in the coming months: “We’re going to build the public record on health care.”

The committee strategy is a shift from previous suggestions the GOP would hold floor votes on repealing provisions of the law on a regular basis — a strategy that would ultimately hurt Republicans, said Norman J. Ornstein, resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

“Unless they are obsessed in a Captain Ahab-like way . . . the more they focus on repealing health care, the more they fall into the trap the Democrats did, where the public says, ‘Hey, enough about health care, what about jobs?’ ” Ornstein said.

And Republicans do not need bipartisan support to hold hearings, as they would to pass legislation through both chambers. Passing multiple repeal bills in the House, only to have those measures languish in the Democratic-controlled Senate, probably would score few political points — especially with Democrats pressing their own case about the law’s benefits.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebeliuswarned Wednesday that repeal would remove important consumer protections and drastically add to the deficit.

“Unless we want to take coverage away from cancer patients, reduce oversight for insurance companies, raise prescription drug costs for seniors, weaken Medicare, add $1 trillion to the deficit and undo dozens of other reforms that are improving health around the country, we can’t afford repeal,” she said in a op-ed piece in the Wednesday edition of the Chicago Tribune.

Republicans will broadcast very different perspectives through their hearings.

“I think you will expect to see a robust hearing schedule — certainly that’s my preference,” said Michael C. Burgess of Texas, a physician and vice chairman of the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee. “We get out of the box quickly and we get some of the key individuals in the committee . . . to talk about what they are doing.”

House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith of Texas said his panel would hold hearings on the constitutional questions that Republicans say are raised by the law, as well as on overhauling the medical liability insurance system to reduce health care costs — a longtime demand of Republicans and doctors’ groups.
Businesses Focus on Specific Issues

Business groups opposed to the law are already anticipating the more targeted repeal bills and are talking with the new majority on how to zero in on the groups’ most despised provisions.

“We want to get a little more laser- focused on some provisions we think are going to affect the business community,” said Amanda Austin, director of federal public policy at the National Federation of Independent Businesses.

“If repeal cannot succeed outright, Congress then has built the case to move on to making more targeted changes in the interim between now and whatever happens in 2012,” said Blair Latoff, communications director for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “The Chamber would like to make incremental changes, using a step-by-step approach.”

Republicans already have moved to repeal one of the provisions under fire from business groups. On Wednesday,Dan Lungren, R-Calif., reintroduced a measure that would repeal an unpopular tax-reporting requirement. Although his bill does not include an offset to make up for the estimated $19.2 billion the provision was expected to generate over the next 10 years to help pay for the overhaul, it gained 185 cosponsors in the last Congress.

In addition, the business groups are trying to win support to repeal a requirement that larger employers provide their employees with health insurance or pay a penalty.

Last Congress, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, introduced legislation, supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to repeal the employer mandate. If repeal is not winnable, business groups say the provision could be made less onerous through legislation to increase exemptions or reduce the penalties — moves that the groups say they would support.

The chamber said it also supports targeting new tax provisions on businesses, the law’s limitations on what can be bought through health savings accounts and its creation of a new long-term insurance program.

Eugene Mulero contributed to this story.