Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) on Monday criticized last week’s firing of District of Columbia insurance commissioner as an attempt to silence a critic of President Obama, and said Democrats should be focusing on firing people responsible for the botched ObamaCare rollout.
Commissioner William White was fired last week after saying Obama’s administrative fix to ObamaCare — aimed at letting people keep insurance plans that are scheduled to be canceled — would undercut the law.
{mosads}”If the President is so eager to see people lose their jobs over the problems with his health insurance takeover, I’ve got some suggestions of where he can start,” Burgess said on the House floor.
“What about the director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight?” he asked. “This was the individual who was supposed to oversee the building of the website and in fact misled congressional committees not once, not twice, but three times over the last year.
“What about the chief information officer for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services? What about the Secretary of Health and Human Services?”
White’s comments were not the only ones critical of Obama’s plan. Several insurance companies have said it would be difficult to quickly reverse their decisions to cancel plans that don’t comply with ObamaCare, and some states have said they won’t use Obama’s announcement as a chance to extend these policies.
Burgess closed his comments by saying people should be fired if they had a role in the launch of ObamaCare, not for criticizing it.
“Instead of people losing jobs for simply disagreeing with the President, we should be holding those people responsible whose overwhelming incompetence has caused this problem in the first place,” he said.