On the recordDecember 2, 2015
nearly 6 years ago this body was on the verge of passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Today the Senate is poised to repeal that insultingly misnamed law. Back in the winter of 2009, of course, we still had yet to pass the bill to see what was in it, although one didn't need a Ph.D. in economics to foresee that the Affordable Care Act would be a mess. It wasn't just conservatives and Republicans raising concerns; every sensible observer saw the obvious flaws and the inevitable disasters embedded in the rickety, ideological scheme congressional Democrats were foisting on the American people in an exercise of unprecedented partisanship. Six years later, the Democratic Party's dream of ObamaCare has become the American people's nightmare. For the past 5 years, the American people have lived with and have suffered through the chaos and dysfunction wrought by ObamaCare's assault on American health care. At every step along the way, opposition to the law has grown stronger and calls for its repeal by the American people have grown louder, which brings us here today. Last year Republicans running for Congress promised to repeal ObamaCare as a first step toward replacing it with real health care and real insurance reform. It was largely on the basis of this pledge that the American people elected to put the GOP in charge of both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.…
