It has been one week since the Senate Majority Leader announced that he had sent his health care bill to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the American people still have not seen Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) version of Obamacare. Last week 40 Senators signed a letter asking Reid to make all materials he sent to the CBO public. Yesterday, Senator Reid finally responded, but not with transparency. Instead he wrote a Dear Colleague letter to all Senator in response:
We are now working to take these publicly available-provisions and meld them together into a single bill. Apart from my decision to include a public option from which states may opt out, no final decisions have been made – and none can be made until we get more information about how CBO would score different combinations. In other words, there is no bill to release publicly – it does not exist.
Why is the Senate Majority Leader fighting transparency? Why can’t the American people see what Harry Reid sent to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)? Senator Reid added a public option “from which stats may opt out” as a new addition to the bills sent to CBO from the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate HELP Committee. What else will be added to the bill? The American people and the opposition party in the Senate are being locked out of the room when decisions are being made by liberal elites on what they have decided to impose on American and call Obamacare. The American people deserve access to legislation that may change the way they access health care and increase their taxation to pay for a plan that may cost as much as $1.4 trillion over the next 10 years.
