Critics tee off on Obama’s health care law as first anniversary passes

While many Americans were focusing on “March Madness,” a panel of members of Congress and health care activists had another kind of “March Madness” in mind Monday night  ̶   the first anniversary of the passage of President Obama’s contentious health care law.

The panel was headlined by Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn and Republican Reps. Tom Price of Georgia, Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, Steve King of Iowa and Michael Burgess of Texas. The lawmakers were also joined by 60 Plus Chairman Jim Martin, Virginia GOP Senate candidate Jamie Radtke and Cato Institute health care expert Michael Cannon, among others, to raise awareness of the implications of the law’s ongoing implementation.

Let Freedom Ring, the Galen Foundation and Independent Women’s Voice co-sponsored the basketball-themed event held at the Capitol’s visitor’s center.

“Real madness  ̶  March Madness  ̶  is America swallowing this large pickle of a health care bill and the indigestion that’s going to come for the next two or three years,” Coburn said.

A large part of what the speakers call madness stems from the approximately $105 billion that the 111th Congress hid in the law to automatically appropriate funds for its implementation until 2019. This provision did not come up for debate in either the House or the Senate and was only recently discovered.

This provision has been largely absent from the current budget debate over House Republican plans to cut $61 billion from the federal budget.

“Did it just escape Nancy Pelosi’s memory  to tell those of us in the House?” Bachmann asked. “This is a bad insult, petty insult to every senator and every House member who voted on this bill  ̶  to be denied material knowledge of this bill.”

“In the private sector, if you have a contract between two parties and you fail to disclose a material term, the contract is void and without an issue  ̶  void from the beginning,” she continued.

The health care law should be void because members of Congress and the people were denied this piece of information, according to Bachmann.

The Obama administration received over $18 billion in 2010 alone to implement the law and a further $4.95 billion has been self-appropriated for 2011, according to a Congressional Research Service report that King’s office studied.

“That’s a pretty sweet down payment to implement this bill, and we know that over 6,000 pages of rules and regulations have been written to this monstrosity of a bill,” Bachmann said.

Although the House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to repeal the health care law last month, the self-funding mechanism governing its implementation remained untouched.

King tried and failed last month to pass an amendment, modeled on a continuing resolution that ended Vietnam War funding in 1974, that would have “shutoff all funding to implement or enforce Obamacare”. But he was ruled out of order when he tried tacking it onto HR 1 because it did not conform to the House rule governing the bill.

“The members of Congress take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, not to uphold some rule that no one can point their finger to and show me the language of at this point,” King said.