Pittenger: Delay individual mandate a year

by Boston Herald, October 1, 2013.

A Republican congressman lashed out at President Obama and downplayed the effect of the government shutdown in an interview on Boston Herald Radio this morning.

“The major concerns of our country are being delivered and life will go on,” Congressman Robert Pittenger (R-N.C.) told BHR host Jeff Katz Katz. “This is the seventeenth shutdown we had in this country. Most of them have been one, two, three or four days. The last one was three weeks. Nonetheless we will work our way through this and we will move on from here. After this we got the debt ceiling issue to discuss.”

The shutdown will not keep members of the U.S. military from getting paid, Social Security checks will go out and airports will remain open as air traffic controllers and TSA agents remain on the job, Pittenger said, blaming the president’s Obamacare plan for the shutdown.

“Isn’t it amazing that the president has reached out to Syria and to Iran, and to Putin but he won’t join American Republicans to try to resolve a problem that we see?” Pittenenger said. “Numbers don’t lie. What is out there in the market right now in terms of jobs and cost and premium increases. Those are real. ... If you look at the job losses, not hiring full-time workers, you see the cost of Obamacare.”

Pittenger said he and his party will seek to go to conference to negotiate with the Senate — a plan rejected by the Senate, which has repeatedly voted down the House budgets that defund Obamacare.

“These are enormous issues that the American people are just finding out,” Pittenger said, defending the position held by some GOP members of the House that Obamacare should be delayed by a year.

“He’s given over a dozen deferrals to other groups. You would think what we proposed made sense which said the individual mandate should be put out for a year. If you’re going to do that for major companies and employers why not do it for the average American?” said Pittenger.