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Congressman Bob Latta (R-Bowling Green) made the following statement after voting against H. R. 3590, the Senate-passed health care bill.  

“I was proud to stand with the majority of Americans who made it clear they did not want the House of Representatives to pass this Democrat health care bill.  With tonight’s vote, Speaker Pelosi, President Obama, Majority Leader Reid, and the overwhelming majority of Democrats in Congress cemented their legacy with the government takeover of one-sixth of our nation’s economy and laying an unthinkable amount of debt and deficits at the feet of our children and grandchildren.  

Without my vote, the House of Representatives passed the $1 trillion dollar Senate-passed health care package littered with over $500 billion dollars in tax hikes, over $500 billion in cuts to Medicare, and an unprecedented expansion of Federal government bureaucracy.  Instead of making health care choices with their doctors, Americans will now be forced to deal with Federal bureaucrats who will dictate their health care decisions.  The Senate-passed bill also lacks the proper language to prevent abortions from being paid for by government funds.  

In addition to opposing the Senate-passed health care bill, I also voted against the reconciliation proposal which does nothing but make a bad bill worse.  This evening prior to passage, we learned that the reconciliation bill is in serious danger of violating the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, leaving it open to a point of order when it reaches the Senate. This point of order would stop it from further proceedings and force the House to pass a new reconciliation bill.  

Over the past year, Congress has debated health care reform where many proposals and ideas were introduced.  Unfortunately as House Republicans offered multiple alternative packages and the American public continued to oppose the House-passed and Senate-passed bills, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, as well as President Obama, ignored the need to start over with a true bipartisan proposal.  The Democrat proposals, each over 2,000 pages long, were drafted without the openness and transparency that President Obama had promised to the American people over and over again in 2008.  The negotiations were far from the scrutiny of the public eye and there was not enough public input.  Even with eleventh-hour public meetings on health care reform, Democrat leadership kept a closed mind and never entertained anything but their legislation.  

Even though a health care reform bill is on its way to the President for his signature, this battle is far from over and I look forward to standing with the American people as we continue to fight against this unprecedented government takeover of our nation’s health care system.”