In yet other indication of how harmful liberal Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) and President Barack Obama’s massive health care overhaul is to middle-class West Virginians, Washington newspaper The Hill reports today that one of the law’s major provisions is poised to slam families with higher insurance costs:
A major provision of the healthcare reform law designed to prevent businesses from dropping coverage for their workers could inadvertently leave families without access to subsidized health insurance. The problem is a huge headache for the Obama administration and Democrats, because it could leave families unable to buy affordable health insurance when the healthcare law requires that everyone be insured starting in 2014. Some of the administration’s closest allies on healthcare reform warn this could dramatically undercut support for the law, which is already unpopular with many voters and contributed to Democrats losing the House in the 2010 midterm elections.
“Joe Manchin ignored the best interests of his state when he voted to keep ObamaCare as the law of the land, and now middle-class West Virginians are being forced to pay for his liberal Washington agenda,” said National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) spokesman Chris Bond. “West Virginians know that they have Manchin and Obama to blame for this massive health care overhaul that raises their costs, hikes their taxes, cuts their Medicare, saddles them with mandates from Washington, and puts America even deeper in debt.”
Manchin’s fellow Washington liberal Nancy Pelosi famously declared that we had to pass ObamaCare to find out what’s in it. Today, thanks to Obama, Pelosi and Manchin, we find that West Virginia families will be forced – under pain of financial penalties – to buy coverage they cannot afford.
Notably, the Obama-Manchin health care overhaul also raises taxes by $570 billion, cuts Medicare by $500 billion in order to fund the federal government’s expansion into other areas of the health care market, imposes an onerous “individual mandate” on every American, and slams state governments like West Virginia’s with at least $118 billion in unfunded Medicaid liabilities through the first decade of full implementation (through 2023). The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reports that the law, known as ObamaCare, will increase federal deficits by $260 billion through 2019.
