Senate Republicans push to overturn individual mandate

Republicans in the U.S. Senate are pushing legislation they say would repeal the individual mandate requirement in Obamacare.

The so-called American Liberty Restoration Act, introduced by Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., would strike a provision in Obamacare that requires everyone buy health insurance.

Hotly contested, Congress in 2010 passed sweeping health care reforms, formally known as Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but commonly called Obamacare. The law was later upheld by the Supreme Court, but that hasn’t stopped critics from working to overturn aspects of the law — or the law in its entirety.

“Since the day that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed into law, I have worked to repeal it because of its terrible consequences on America’s families and small businesses,” U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., a co-sponsor of the measure, said in a statement. “I believe that we are going down a dangerous path by
requiring individuals to purchase a product, including health care, and I am proud to stand by my colleagues today to ensure that Americans are not forced to comply with the individual mandate that is set to be implemented next year. Instead, we need commonsense solutions that improve the cost and quality of health care through competition and choice, rather than imposing job-killing mandates and penalties on the American people.”

The individual mandate aspect of the law takes effect next year.

“The $2.6 trillion health law is driving up health care costs, increasing taxes on families, stifling job creation, and reducing the quality of patient care,” Hatch said in a statement. “What’s more, it for the first time in our nation’s history requires every American to purchase insurance even if they don’t want it. This legislation we are introducing today is simple: it strikes the individual mandate, so we can instead find ways of providing people with health care, but in a manner that doesn’t run counter to our constitutional framework of limited government.”