US President Barack Obama on Friday vetoed legislation to repeal his health care law, saying the measure “would reverse the significant progress we have made in improving health care in America.”
The veto was expected, but Republicans claimed victory with the vote, saying that they met two goals by finally passing a repeal bill: Keeping a promise to voters in an election year and showing that they are capable of repealing the law if a Republican wins November’s presidential election.
The issue is expected to be a factor in the campaign with Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton defending it against Republicans.
Republican lawmakers have pushed many repeal measures since 2010, when Obama signed the health care, his signature domestic achievement, into law. This was the first of those bills to clear the US Congress and reach his desk.
In his veto message to Congress, Obama disagreed with critics of the measure. The president said the Affordable Care Act, widely referred to as “Obamacare,” includes fairer rules and stronger consumer protections “that have made health care coverage more affordable, more attainable and more patient-centered. And it is working.”
The US Senate passed the measure last year under special rules that protected it from Democratic delaying tactics and the House passed it this week.
US House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, predicted it would be “a matter of time” before the law is finally overturned.
“We have now shown that there is a clear path to repealing Obamacare without 60 votes in the Senate,” Ryan said. “So, next year, if we’re sending this bill to a Republican president, it will get signed into law. Obamacare will be gone... It’s just a matter of time.”
For maximum visibility, Republican leaders made the legislation their first major vote of this year. Although they do not have the votes to override Obama’s veto, they scheduled an override vote for Jan. 26.
“We will hold a vote to override this veto, taking this process all the way to the end under the Constitution,” Ryan said.
The bill would dismantle the health law’s key pillars, including requirements that most people obtain coverage and that larger employers offer it to workers.
More than 16 million people have gained health coverage since the law was enacted, according to government figures. They could risk losing it under the Republican approach.
The US president said reliable health care coverage would no longer be a right for everyone under the bill, but would become “a privilege for a few.”
He admonished lawmakers for wasting time “refighting old political battles” and said they should instead be working on policies to grow the economy, help middle-class families and create jobs.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS