Rubio opposes Stop-Gap government funding bill — unless it defunds Obamacare
Rubio: “Senator Cruz from Texas is offering this amendment to defund ObamaCare. If that gets onto the bill, in essence if they get a continuing resolution and we vote on that and we can pass it onto a bill, I will vote for a continuing resolution, even if it’s temporary, because it does something permanent and that is defund this health care bill, this ObamaCare bill that is going to be an absolute disaster for the American economy.”
Excerpts of Interview with Hugh Hewitt – Full interview available here.
Senator Marco Rubio: “Well first of all, I don’t think anyone is in favor of shutting down the government, but I think that is where we are headed ultimately here, unfortunately, if we don’t fix our debt problem. And I’m talking about down the road long term – long term meaning five, six, three years. We don’t know when a debt crisis will happen. So look, about a year and a half ago, I voted for the first continuing resolution and then I announced, ‘This is the last continuing resolution, the last stop-gap measure that I am going to vote for. I will only vote, from here on, on something serious.’ And so far we haven’t seen that. All we see is this ‘kicking the can down the road’, these manufactured crises. As if the people back home don’t have enough to worry about with all the problems we have today, now Washington every month seems to be creating a new crisis for them to worry about and for the media to freak out about. But here is what I’ve said about this continuing resolution, you know Senator Cruz from Texas is offering this amendment to defund ObamaCare. If that gets onto the bill, in essence if they get a continuing resolution and we vote on that and we can pass it onto a bill, I will vote for a continuing resolution, even if it’s temporary, because it does something permanent and that is de-fund this health care bill, this ObamaCare bill that is going to be an absolute disaster for the American economy. You are already starting to feel the outer edges of that. In all these debates that we have been having, we have lost sight of how truly bad the health care law is. I understand the Supreme Court ruled the way they did. It doesn’t make a good public policy, and you’re already starting to hear about it. I am already running into businesses that are planning next year on not hiring next year or laying some people off so they don’t have to meet these mandates. Others are going to push their employees off of their private plans that they offer and onto these exchanges, driving up the cost for the public. So, this is going to be an implementation disaster. It’s going to hurt our economy severely, and we aren’t spending enough time talking about that.”
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Rubio: “Right, I don’t know if that alone will be enough, but I would certainly support that amendment. I would certainly support that measure because it’s going to hurt patients. What’s going to happen now is that it’s going to become less of an incentive to get into that business and the accessibility of these innovations is going to become less. This is one of the arguments that people were using, and that I echoed. I wasn’t in the Senate when ObamaCare came up, but we don’t just want affordable health insurance market place – that is very important – we want the highest quality healthcare. We want the latest, greatest innovations. That is what Americans have come to expect. You start taxing innovation, people are going to stop innovating here in this country.”
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Rubio: “I think it’s coming next week. That is what Senator Reid has announced. That is one of the reasons he wanted to have the Brennan vote this week is because he wants to get on it next week. So, I think you can anticipate this argument next week, and I think it is the perfect opportunity for us to have a debate once again on ObamaCare. I don’t think there has been enough attention paid to it. It has been a while. We have moved on to these other issues, but there is right now out there probably nothing more damaging to our economy in the short term than this implementation of ObamaCare.”
