E-Newsletter: The Crisis that Didn't Have to be

Statement

Dear friends,

For nearly three weeks Americans have woken up to daily headlines denouncing the abject failure of the Obamacare roll out. What is more, you know things are not going well when some of the President's own teammates and biggest cheerleaders are not showing up to his pep rally. One of President Obama's most trusted advisers, Robert Gibbs, called the roll out, "excruciatingly embarrassing," Washington Postcolumnist, Ezra Klein said it has been a "big failure" so far, and CNN's Wolf Blitzer admitted that, "Obamacare should have been delayed a year."

In Wisconsin we do not need pundits or polls to show us that this healthcare "reform" is not what we bargained for. The White House has not yet released any official numbers, but one story reported that fewer than fifty people in Wisconsin have been able to sign-up for the exchanges. The website that cost taxpayers nearly half a billion dollars is rampant with errors, and those who have been able to get in are finding out that their premiums are going up and their choices are going down. One constituent told me recently that he only qualified for one exchange and it required him to trade in his neighborhood physician for one thirty miles away.

Even the President's top Obamacare advisor, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, admitted this week that the site was not ready for prime time. The Wall Street Journal cited the Secretary's comments from a recent interview, "We didn't have enough testing, specifically for high volumes, for a very complicated project." The online insurance marketplace needed five years of construction and a year of testing, she said: "We had two years and almost no testing."

This is a crisis that didn't have to be.

The President has fought harder to keep his family and his Administration out of Obamacare than he has to fix it. He may not understand just how frustrating it has been for so many American families who tried to sign up for Obamacare on a website that didn't work because he exempted his own family and his Administration from the very healthcare program he has forced on the rest of America.

Republicans offered a very fair and reasonable alternative. We asked for the President and his Administration to be included in Obamacare and we also requested that individual Americans receive the same one year delay from the tax penalty that he gave to big businesses. Not only would this have given the American people a much desired reprieve, it would have given him, and his Administration, a much needed delay. There is still time for the President to take us up on our offer. I encourage him to take a step back, delay the mandate for a year and give himself the opportunity to fix his healthcare system, or better yet, cut his losses and move on. I agree that our healthcare system is not perfect, let's work together to produce fairer and better reforms that will actually work for the American people.

Thanks for the continued opportunity to be your Representative in Congress. As always, please continue to share your thoughts and feedback via Facebook and Twitter.
Have a great week,

Sean

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