U.S. Senator Kit Bond (R) spoke out on healthcare overhaul from the Senate floor, calling the measure a “job-killing agenda” headed by Democrats and President Obama. He says the focus instead should be on creating jobs as unemployment nears 10 percent.
“Instead of this job-killing bill that will increase health care costs, raise taxes, and cut Medicare services for seniors, Congress should repeal the Democrats’ job-killing bills and pass real reform that will improve access and lower the cost of care,” he says. “We need to repeal this bill and enact real health care reform that will lower health care costs for Americans and improve care.”
Bond tells his colleages in the Senate that “The folks in Missouri have shown me – through emails, phone calls, and letters to my office – and by stopping me everywhere I go – from the grocery store to restaurants – that they want a jobs-creating agenda. They do not want this monstrosity of a healthcare bill or this reconciliation bill which will do the opposite by providing job-killing provisions and disincentives to hire.”
Bond says the Majority has ignored the American people, and instead of promoting a jobs-creating agenda, the Majority seems hell bent on passing a jobs-killing agenda.
“This reconciliation bill undermines employers’ ability to create jobs, and by extension, extends the recession and all of the misery associated with it…The government is literally prohibiting economic growth though these healthcare bills – which really should be called job-killing bills,” he says. “Despite what some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle believe, it is not the government that creates jobs in the private sector…the timing of this bill and the employer mandate will result in a ‘perfect storm’ to kill small business and private sector job creation.”
 “When President Obama says that Health Care should be the model for the role of government in the economy, he is talking about the European Socialist model, which has demonstrated that it does not grow as quickly as the United States economy,” Bond says.
Read Bond’s full statement here.
AUDIO: Listen to Bond address the U.S. Senate here (11 min.)
AUDIO: Listen to Bond’s roundtable discussion with Missouri journalists here.