Time to take action against portions of healthcare law (Sen. Orrin Hatch)

Our nation’s economy is not recovering like the
Administration promised. It remains perilously weak despite the White House’s
outlandish claims about the trillion dollar stimulus spending bill “saving or
creating” millions of jobs. We’ve witnessed first-time claims for unemployment
reach a nine-month high. Our unemployment rate is stuck at 9.5 percent. And
home sales have dropped by a whopping 27 percent in just one month.

In fact, many businesses aren’t willing to invest
or hire new employees because they are taking it on the chin because of this
Administration’s agenda. That’s one of the core reasons I fought the health
law, because it’s built upon spending money we don’t have, raising taxes, and
more government intrusion into people’s lives – hurting our recovery and our
economy at the worst possible time.

In response, I crafted a straight-forward bill to
repeal the employer mandate that will punish our job creators at a time when
they need to start hiring again. In fact the non-partisan Congressional Budget
Office (CBO) found that employer mandates alone would slap over $50 billion in
new taxes on businesses. 

Last week, I announced that this legislation has
garnered the support of four important groups representing our nation’s job
creators – the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation of Independent
Business, National Association of Wholesalers, and the National Retail
Federation. 

In a letter to me supporting my legislation, the
Chamber laid out why getting rid of this provision is so important: “Businesses
with fewer than 50 full-time equivalent employees are hesitant to grow their
businesses or hire what would amount to the 50th employee; under current law,
the impending employer mandate would subject them to dangerous new requirements
and penalties.”

NFIB explained how it punishes struggling workers: 
“Employer mandates are blunt instruments that do not address the fundamental
issues of our flawed health care system. Research has shown they are highly
regressive and punish lower-margin firms and lower-wage workers. In difficult
economic times, we depend on these types of firms to stabilize and expand, not
increase their costs. They are the engines of growth and recovery and employer
mandates throttle them.”

If the employer mandate weren’t enough, this
administration chose to include an individual mandate requiring every American
to purchase health insurance even if they don’t want it. This is stretching the
bounds of the Constitution to a place our Founders never intended. The bottom
line is if the federal government can require you to do this, then what can’t
it force you to do? 

After fighting this provision tooth and nail, I was
pleased that my home state of Utah was in the original group of 13 states that
filed the first lawsuit in Florida minutes after President Obama signed it into
law. I introduced the American Liberty Restoration Act that also was endorsed
by NFIB and NRF to get rid of this unparalleled expansion of federal power.

With a Democrat in the White House, a straight
repeal of this legislative monstrosity would be extremely tough. The President
would simply pull out his veto pen. What we need to do instead is work
strategically to take down these two pillars propping up ObamaCare that
threaten our economic future and our fundamental liberty. From there we need to
enact real, market-based reforms that would expand access to lower cost health
care. 

We should
start with common-sense step-by-step solutions that reduce health care costs
and increase  affordability, such as medical liability reform, allowing families
to purchase insurance across stateliness and empowering small businesses to
pool together like large corporations to negotiate better rates. Most
importantly, we need to empower our states to become the laboratories of
sustainable, real reform efforts, instead of pushing this one-size-fits-all
Washington-dictated approach.