WASHINGTON — Just hours after the House voted again to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Rep. Michele Bachmann said the law “literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens.”
Bachmann joined a group of conservatives to give floor speeches Thursday marking the three-year anniversary of the law. Bachmann said “Obamacare” will disproportionately hurt women and children because the law only requires companies to offer health insurance to employees, but not technically to their families.
“This is devastating for moms across America, for children across America, for senior citizens across America,” she said. “Let’s repeal this failure before it literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens. Let’s not do that. Let’s love people, let’s care about people, let’s repeal it now while we can.”
In December, federal regulators decided that companies need to provide “affordable” health insurance to workers and their families, but that there would be no penalty if the worker couldn’t afford it. Bachmann said such rules would hurt woman, who are more dependent on their spouse for insurance than men, and that “there are going to be people that die because of this.”
Here’s video of Bachmann’s speech. It starts at about the 2:27:00 mark. Or, watch the quoted portion embedded below:
The House voted Thursday to repeal the Affordable Care Act as part of the GOP budget plan. The budget will not pass in the Senate.
The floor speech capped a busy news week for Bachmann, as the Strib notes. Fact checkers brokedown her weekend speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, which also drew high-profile scrutiny from CNN and Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly.
Devin Henry can be reached at dhenry@minnpost.com.