Jeb Hensarling 
WEEKLY WASHINGTON UPDATE
January 24, 2011
This past week was an important week in Washington as I voted with the majority of House members to repeal the massive, government-controlled health care bill.
This overwhelming vote fulfilled a promise Republicans made to the American people and demonstrated that Washington is beginning to understand that, when it comes to Obamacare, you cannot help the job seeker by punishing the job creator and you cannot improve the health care of a nation by impoverishing its children.
Solving our spending problem means health care will continue to be a contentious debate in Washington and one in which the President’s party will have a great deal of trouble coming to grips with the facts.
We are now at the point where budgetary smoke and mirrors, good intentions and wishful thinking won’t cut it. You cannot change the ruinous spending path of our government if you leave the President’s health care law virtually untouched and leave out fundamental reform of Medicare.
Let me offer 2.6 trillion reasons that we needed to repeal Obamacare – because that is the true cost of the legislation, with $700 billion more added to the deficit. Obamacare included half a trillion dollars in new taxes, the 1099 form, the minimum benefit standard, all job crushing regulations.
Now I know my friends on the other side of the aisle will contend something else, but when they passed Obamacare somehow in their accounting, they left out the $115 billion dollars it cost to implement, they double counted almost half a trillion dollars in taxes, social security, cutting Medicare by half a billion, the slight of hand of 10 years of taxes and six years of spending.
The bottom line is that Washington’s Big Spenders can play all the accounting games they want, but until we change the architecture of Obamacare and reform Medicare for future generations, there is no road to fiscal sanity, because federal spending on health care will not go down. If we want to preserve the American Dream for future generations the answer is pretty simple – we have to stop spending.
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Congressman Jeb Hensarling
129 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
(903) 675-8288
For more information about Congressman Jeb Hensarling and
his commitment to the people of the 5th District of Texas,
please visit www.house.gov/hensarling