In the wake of Wednesday’s vote for full repeal of the health reform law, House Republicans are now moving forward on multiple tracks to undo key provisions.
GOP leaders have charged four committee chairmen with holding hearings on the law and drafting alternative bills to address key health care issues, such as expanding access to insurance and bringing down costs.
That work got underway this week, when the House Judiciary Committee held its first health-care hearing, focusing on medical liability reform.
Another hearing, set for Wednesday in the Ways & Means Committee, will focus on the health reform law’s cost, including the impact of “taxes, regulations, and mandates” on the economy.
The two other committees, the Energy and Commerce and the Education and Workforce panels, haven’t released a hearing schedule yet. But they’re likely to dig into a wide array of issues. One key goal for the GOP is to block implementation and funding for the Democrats’ signature domestic achievement.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has not set a timetable for the committees to draft replacement legislation, but the effort could unfold over the course of the next two years.
“More important than the House repeal vote are the efforts expected to target and defund parts of the law or to slow implementation. How successful these efforts will be remains to be determined,” Drew Altman, president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation, wrote in a recent column analyzing the political implications of the House repeal effort.
“It does not require high level political analysis,” he added, “to figure out the next big external event that will affect implementation of the law–the 2012 presidential election,”