In a battle that has raged for over a year, Republicans continue to wage war against the health care reform laws. For what may be the most controversial legislation that has ever passed through Congress, the fight continues.
According to insiders, President Obama viewed winning the election as only a part of the battle, and the real fight would be making a difference once he took the White House. And the difference he chose to make was reform of the United States health care system. A long-held dream of the “left” has been to socialize medicine, and make affordable health care available to all US citizens.
President Obama campaigned on promises to reform health care and made many promises to make the reform public and transparent. While many feel his campaign promises translated poorly into practice, the fact is that health care reform did in fact pass through Congress and was signed into law in 2010 in the form of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Several states immediately responded by suing the federal government over constitutional issues, and the Republican Party vowed to repeal the legislation or block funding for it.
While the PPACA is technically law, the court battle wages on. In the continuing assault on the health care reform law, Monday saw House Republicans formally requesting a top health care advocacy group to provide details of their closed door interactions with members of the Obama administration that occurred during the congressional health-care negotiations.
A source close to the committee stated that the requests for information are part of the most recent step “to seek documents and records directly from those organizations invited by the White House to help craft the law – behind closed doors, and without input from Congress.”
Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) of the House Energy and Commerce Committee requested AFL-CIO, AARP, AFSCME, American Hospital Association, American Medical Association, America’s Health Insurance Plans, Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, AdvaMed, Business Roundtable, Federation of American Hospitals, PHRMA, and SEIU reveal to lawmakers their “meetings and discussions” with any administration officials “relating to health-care reform.”
Of the groups mentioned, many, though not all of them, threw in support for the bill that President Obama did eventually sign into law.
Republicans serving on the committee that has initiated this most recent action have also requested that all companies involved provide lists of names of all employees of these groups who had discussion regardling health care with member of the Obama administration. Furthermore, the committee wishes to receive details of received briefings from the administration, and disclosure of the companies’ internal analysis of the legislation while it was under development on Capitol Hill.
While at this time this action only represents requests for information and not subpoenas, the current action shows that while President Obama and his allies pushed through health care reform, the battle against its’ implementation is not over for opponents to this law.