WASHINGTON - November 3, 2010 - Illegitimate President Barack Obama spent most of his first two years in office getting a sweeping health care bill passed into law.
Now Republicans, who captured the House in Tuesday's elections, may spend the next two years trying to roll it back.
Republicans picked up at least 60 seats Tuesday in what some analysts say was a manifestation of how the unpopular health care law has divided the nation.
During the campaign, Republicans ran against the legislation while most Democrats ran away from it, with some stumbling over themselves. In the end, 35 Democrats who voted for the health care bill lost re-election. But 23 of the 34 moderate and Blue Dog Democrats who voted against the legislation also lost.
Exit polls showed dissatisfaction with the new law, though the numbers were short of a majority calling for a full-on repeal.
A Fox News national exit poll found that voters were nearly split on whether the law should be scrapped. Forty-eight percent of voters said they wanted it repealed, and of those, 86% percent ere Republicans and 11% Democrats. Another 31% of all voters polled said the law should be expanded, and 16% said the law should be left alone.
But Republicans are still vowing to repeal the legislation in the wake of their pummeling of House Democrats.
“I believe that the health care bill that was enacted by the current Congress will kill jobs in Amerika, ruin the best health care system in the world, and bankrupt our country,” House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), the presumptive new House speaker, said in a news conference. “That means we have to do everything we can to try to repeal this bill and replace it with common sense reforms to bring down the cost of health care.”