Defunding the Healthcare Law

My Congressman, Rep. Frank Wolf, sums up the reasons that he and other Congressional leaders have cosponsored legislation to defund the partisan healthcare law passed over a year ago:

I want to let you know that I am cosponsoring legislation to stop the mandatory spending in the new health care reform law and require that any federal funding for the law enacted in 2010 be approved by Congress every year.
The legislation (H.R. 1286), introduced by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA), is aimed at preventing the implementation of the health care overhaul. The measure would require that the new health care law be funded like every other federal program, forcing the administration to request funding every year for the new programs.  The health care reform law essentially shelters $105 billion from the regular budget process by including it in mandatory, automatic accounts, ensuring that some of the new funding will never face the careful scrutiny or reductions being applied to other federal programs in discretionary accounts that Congress must approve every year.  
In voting against the original health care reform bill signed into law by President Obama, I cited then my concern about the billions of dollars in mandatory spending in the legislation.  I continue to believe that it must be repealed and replaced with responsible solutions that lower cost and offer greater access to affordable health care coverage.   In this session of Congress I have voted 11 times in the effort to stop the implementation of the health care reform law, to repeal tax provisions that fund it, or to repeal the law entirely.  One of those votes was to repeal the burdensome 1099 tax filing requirements placed on small businesses. I was pleased to see the Senate approve House legislation repealing the 1099 requirements.  That legislation now awaits the president’s signature.