Vote Alert: House: $500 Billion Healthcare Bill

This vote was on H.R. 2, the Medicare Access and Chip Reauthorization Act which is expected to increase the nation's debt by $500 billion over the next 20 years. This bill was cobbled together in a backroom deal by Speaker Boehner and Minority Leader Pelosi. Overall H.R. 2 is a massive health care spending bill that replaces the existing Medicare payment system for health care providers, known as the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR), with a new bureaucratic pay scheme that would automatically increase reimbursements every year. Although everyone agrees that the SGR was a flawed system, this bill merely replaced one top-down bureaucratic price-control system with a new one, albeit with a more generous reimbursement rate. With this bill Congress failed to address the underlying problems in healthcare entitlements and in true back room deal fashion, included several extraneous provisions designed to buy votes. The bill passed the House on March 26, 2015 in a roll call vote of 392-37.

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Conservative position: NO