Dean Longo, Republican candidate challenging U.S. Rep. Robert C. "Bobby" Scott in the 3rd Congressional District, issued the following response Thursday to the U.S. Supreme Court 5-4 decision to uphold President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act:
"There’s no question we need to facilitate good health care, not force a broken health-care system on people. There’s no question there are people out there that need health care through no fault of their own. This doesn’t actually fix anything. Whether you want to call it an unconstitutional mandate or you want to call it a tax, in the end it’s not going to fix very much what-so-ever.
"Me, as a business owner for example, I have to be faced with a choice of a $1,200-a-month health-care policy or a $500 tax. Now $500 is still going to be less than $1,200 a month I've got to pay for health care that I can't afford. So I'm going to end up paying $500 more in taxes and not have any more access to health care - so my taxes just went up and I'm not receiving anything. There's a lot of people that are going to be in that position. A lot of small business owners aren't going to be able to access health care anymore than they do now. They're just going to have their taxes raised.
"A lot of people are going to also lose their health care through their companies, because companies are going to say, 'This is too much for us; this is too expensive now. We're just going to handle our own health care.' So now if I'm working for a large company that doesn't want to pay for that I'm going to have to foot the bill for those health-care costs.
"What it's going to end up doing is push more and more people on to that government program. Then the costs for the government are going to sky rocket. It's going to get to a point where it's unaffordable and the health care benefits people are receiving are going to go down.And we've ended up, in the big picture, with an unaffordable health-care system where everybody's now reliant on it, but nobody's going to be able to access it.
"We need health-care reform, not forcing people on to a broken health-care system. It's a political battle now."
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