Congress sends health care repeal to obama, setting up certain veto

Congressional Republicans made good Wednesday on a central campaign pledge from the 2014 midterms, delivering a bill repealing the health care reform law they loathe to President Obama’s desk, forcing a certain veto.The bill passed 240 to 181, with one House Democrat supporting the bill and three Republicans opposing it, after passing the Senate 52 to 47 last month. Neither margin is large enough to override a veto.But House Speaker Paul D. Ryan said the vote would prompt the
direct clash that Republican voters have long sought. “We are confronting the president with the hard, honest truth: Obamacare doesn’t work,” he said at a news conference Wednesday.The problem for GOP leaders is that the repeal vote is too little, too late for GOP voters across the country who hold increasingly dim views of party leaders in Washington and have flocked to outsider presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ben Carson. Ryan, barely two months into his new role as GOP standard bearer, has been left to sell another symbolic vote — the latest in dozens of anti-Obamacare votes — as a significant step forward to frustrated conservatives.Over the past month, Ryan has sought to strike a delicate balance between tempering expectations about what can be done while Obama is still in office and pledging to pursue a “bold alternative agenda” that will highlight the differences between Republicans and Democrats going into 2016. And in recent days, Ryan has portrayed the repeal vote as the first step in doing so.

[Paul Ryan pledges a ‘complete alternative’ to the Democratic agenda]

“I mean, how many times have we been saying we want to put bills on his desk that say who we are and what we believe versus what he believes,” Ryan (R-Wis.) told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday night. “We have to go on offense in 2016, and we have to offer a bold agenda to the country.”Wednesday’s vote is a milestone in that Republicans have finally maneuvered past the Senate filibuster that left all the previous Obamacare repeal measures languishing, using the arcane budget reconciliation process that was employed by Democrats in 2009 to pass Obama’s signature domestic achievement. The bill also blocks Planned Parenthood from receiving federal health care funds after the group found itself under renewed GOP attack.