House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa: Wasting taxpayer money on bogus hearings since 2011.
Via Steve Benen, House Government Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa has been keeping himself busy by holding taxpayer-funded
field hearings anti-Obamacare press events throughout country, most recently
in Arizona:
Several Arizona residents criticized the Affordable Care Act at a hearing Friday in Apache Junction, telling members of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that they will be forced against their will to change health insurers.
Of course, unlike at real Congressional hearings, where competing voices are given an opportunity to be heard, this was nothing but a taxpayer-funded political stunt:
Only Republican congressional members took part in the hearing, titled “ObamaCare Implementation, the Broken Promise: If You Like Your Current Plan You Can Keep It.” The only four witnesses invited to testify were residents who said they have been negatively affected by the new federal health-care program.
Audience members were not permitted to speak.
The "hearing" followed a familiar pattern: Similar events in
Georgia and
North Carolina also refused to listen to anyone with anything good to say about Obamacare, opting instead to rehash familiar lines of attack from the GOP. So despite being billed as information gathering exercises, the only thing we "learned" from these hearings is that even though HealthCare.gov is now
on the mend, Republicans still have only one thing they want to do with Obamacare: Repeal it.