WASHINGTON, D.C.— At a House GOP conference meeting this morning, Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) made clear the choice members have to keep their promises to the American people to repeal and replace Obamacare by supporting the American Health Care Act endorsed by President Trump, or vote to continue the Obamacare death spiral by opposing the plan.

As reported by CNN:
Scalise: You’re with Pelosi or Trump: “The No. 3 House Republican, Rep. Steve Scalise put up a slide at Wednesday morning’s closed door Republican conference meeting that had a split screen, according to sources who attended the session. One slide had a picture of Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House and former speaker, with a quote saying the Republican health care bill couldn’t be any worse. On the other side was a picture of Trump with a quote saying he was proud to back the leadership’s legislation. Scalise referenced the picture, and according to these sources in the room, posed the question to members unhappy the bill doesn’t go far enough to reverse Obamacare: whose side are you on?”

As Scalise remarked during a House leadership press conference following the meeting,“When this bill went through, we made a promise to the American people that if we ever had the opportunity with the House, the Senate, and the White House, we would go to work to repeal this failed law and rescue the American people from the damage that’s been done by Obamacare. Today what’s really exciting is that I get to go into that same room in Energy and Commerce where Obamacare passed back in 2009 to start the work of repealing and replacing Obamacare with actual laws will put patients back in charge of their healthcare decisions.” 

See Scalise’s full remarks below. For the full video of Scalise’s remarks, click here or on the image below.

Remarks: 

“Back in 2009 when Obamacare started moving through Congress, we predicted that this law would fail because of all of the provisions in the bill that destroyed what was good in healthcare.

“This is my original copy of Obamacare. I’d just gotten on the Energy and Commerce Committee when we started to have hearings on the bill. It moved through, over months and months, and as we went through this bill you could see all the components that were going to destroy healthcare for families. When the President said, ‘If you like what you have, you can keep it’ we predicted the provisions that took away the ability for families to make their healthcare choices would destroy the doctor-patient relationship. Unfortunately, that turned out to be true. When we looked at all the taxes that were in this bill, a trillion dollars in new taxes, we predicted that the cost of healthcare was going to go up dramatically for families and unfortunately that turned out to be true.

“When this bill went through, we made a promise to the American people that if we ever had the opportunity with the House, the Senate, and the White House, we would go to work to repeal this failed law and rescue the American people from the damage that’s been done by Obamacare. Today what’s really exciting is that I get to go into that same room in Energy and Commerce where Obamacare passed back in 2009 to start the work of repealing and replacing Obamacare with actual laws will put patients back in charge of their healthcare decisions. There’s a real focus on lowering costs for families and letting people make those important decisions so that the doctor-patient relationship can finally get restored and the freedom of the ability for families to not have an unelected bureaucrat in Washington tell them what they can or can’t buy, they can actually make those decisions for themselves.

“This is going to be an important first step today in finally rescuing families across this country from the devastation that is Obamacare.”

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