Republican Leader John Boehner | The President’s Health Care Plan Will Destroy American Jobs

Republican Leader John Boehner | The President’s Health Care Plan Will Destroy American Jobs

Yesterday, President Obama released a health care proposal that represents a doubling down by Democrats in their determination to defy the will of the American people and pass a government takeover of health care. Their latest iteration of health care “reform” manages to “take the worst of both the House and Senate bills and combine them into something more destructive,” as the Wall Street Journal put it in an editorial today.

As House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) said in a press briefing today:

Americans are still asking ‘where are the jobs?‘ Yet the Democrats’ new health care proposal increases the Senate bill’s tax on employers who do not provide coverage from $750 to $2,000 per employee. CBO and numerous health care economists have made it clear that such a provision will reduce wages and eliminate jobs. Republicans have offered common-sense reforms to help small businesses create jobs. That’s what the American people want, not the job-killing agenda that Democrats keep trying to jam down their throats.

In an op-ed entitled “Obamacare 2.0 Is a Job Killer,” economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth wrote on Real Clear Markets today:

What should the Washington brain trust do to improve our economic situation? Surely two actions should not be on the table: (1) raise taxes which would discourage employment; and (2) deprive Americans of their health insurance policies.

Yet these two steps are at the heart of President Obama’s health care ‘reform,’ released Monday. Like the House and Senate plans, it would raise about $500 billion in taxes over the next decade, discouraging employment, and it would outlaw most health insurance plans in America.

As Leader Boehner noted, among the worst provisions of the President’s partisan plan include a dramatic hike of the “employer mandate,” which will only serve to increase the cost of employment, prolonging the length of unemployment for millions of Americans. And the new taxes in the President’s plan would fall hardest on small businesses, as the Wall Street Journal reported this morning:

Some small-business advocates criticized President Barack Obama’s proposed health-care overhaul as imposing stiffer requirements on employers to provide insurance for workers while not doing enough to lower costs. Under the White House proposal released Monday, businesses with more than 50 employees must offer health insurance or pay $2,000 per person. That is up from a fine of $750 per employee in the health bill passed by the Senate….

Also of concern to the manufacturers’ group is the White House plan-similar to one in the Senate bill-to expand Medicare funding by charging a 0.9% surtax on individuals whose incomes exceed $200,000. ‘That will hurt small manufacturers much more harshly because about 70% of manufacturers pay taxes at the individual rate,’ Ms. Battle [director of tax policy for National Association of Manufacturers] said.

That’s not all the new taxes the President proposes. Bloomberg News reported that “[t]o help pay for the overhaul, [the President is] proposing the first Medicare tax on unearned income such as capital gains.”

The timing for tax hikes couldn’t be worse for millions of Americans who are asking, “where are the jobs?“ Reuters noted today that “Nearly 20 percent of the U.S. workforce lacked adequate employment in January and struggled to make ends meet with reduced resources and bleak job prospects.”

Instead of continuing to push a government takeover of health care that the American people have soundly rejected, the President and Democratic Leaders on Capitol Hill should scrap their plan and start over on with a step-by-step approach to health care reform focused on lowering costs - which is exactly what Republicans are fighting for.

To learn more about Republicans’ health care solutions, visit HealthCare.GOP.gov.