Democratic lawmakers are expressing more misgivings over President Obama’s controversial health care law as the Supreme Court weighs whether or not to strike it down as unconstitutional. The Hill reports:
"I think we would all have been better off—President Obama politically, Democrats in Congress politically, and the nation would have been better off—if we had dealt first with the financial system and the other related economic issues and then come back to healthcare," said Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), who is retiring at the end of this Congress.
Miller, who voted for the law, said the administration wasted time and political capital on healthcare reform, resulting in lingering economic problems that will continue to plague Obama’s reelection chances in 2012.
Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-Calif.) also criticized his party’s handling of the issue, and said he repeatedly called on his leaders to figure out how they were going to pay for the bill, and then figure out what they could afford.
Cardoza argued that the bill should have been debated and passed "in digestible pieces that the American public could understand and that we could implement."
Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.), an ardent supporter of the new law, recently told New York magazine that Democrats "paid a terrible price for healthcare."
Concerns over the cost of implementing the law have weighed heavily on its popularity. A new study authored by a former trustee for Medicare and Social Security found that the health care law—touted as a cost-saving measure—would actually increase the federal deficit by $340 billion over the next decade.