One Year Later, Issa Attempts To Re-Ignite Health Care Debate

One year after it was signed into law, Lake Elsinore/Wildomar congressional representative Darrell Issa, R-CA, has introduced a bill that aims to stall the president’s health care reform, otherwise known as the Patients Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Issa, who represents California's 49th district, and Joe Walsh, R-IL, co-sponsored the bill named the Constitutional Protection Act. It was introduced March 22 and if passed would bar congress from taking action on the Patients Protection and Affordable Care Act until federal court cases threatening to overturn it are closed.

The constitutionality of the Patients Protection and Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law by the president March 23, 2010, has been challenged, and two court case are pending so funding it is a bad idea, Issa said.

“While ObamaCare remains, at best, in constitutional limbo, it’s beyond reckless to allow taxpayer dollars to be spent hiring new government regulators to oversee the creation of its massive and legally dubious bureaucracy,” he said in an emailed statement.

The new health care program was not only financially dangerous, but immoral, Walsh said in the statement.“It is fiscally reckless to fund this morally odious and thoroughly unconstitutional piece of legislation,” he said.

Only days before Issa introduced the Constitutional Protection Act, he also introduced a bill with Senator John Ensign, R-NV, that aims to increase transparency on how the government deals with health care waivers.

The health care debate has largely been a partisan issue.

On the one-year anniversary of the health care reform Act last week, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) issued a press statement.

“In just one year, we’ve helped 350,000 California seniors with their prescription drug costs and allowed young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance policies until age 26," Boxer wrote. "We’ve made it easier for thousands of California small businesses to cover their employees and helped protect consumers by eliminating lifetime caps on coverage and preventing insurance companies from denying care to children due to a pre-existing condition. 

“While the problems of our health care system cannot be solved overnight, we are making important progress. We cannot go back to the days when we left too many of our citizens at risk without access to life-saving health care,” Boxer said.

Support for either of Issa's bills is unclear. The health care debate in America has quieted one year after the Patients Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed into law.

According to a March 8 Pew Research Center index rating, just 2 percent of news coverage was devoted to health care for the week Feb. 28 through March 6.

Since that time, health care reporting has filled even fewer news pages.

Click here for a copy of Issa's Constitutional Protection Act, H.R. 1185.

Click here to read the House version of the Health Care Waiver Transparency Act.