Rep. Peter Roskam, who introduced legislation Thursday calling for a chief watchdog to keep track of the $1.8 trillion that will be spent on Obamacare in the next 10 years, tells Newsmax TV's John Bachman and J.D. Hayworth that oversight of the healthcare law is critical.
"We're going to find out where the money is going and why there's been so much failure around it and why the administration has not been forthcoming with the information that they have a duty to disclose," the Illinois Republican said on "America's Forum" Friday.
"The special inspector general has been incredibly successful in other elements of large governmental expenditures. We don't have to look any further than the special inspector general for Iraq, for Afghanistan, and for the TARP program, the Wall Street bailout.
"Interestingly, President Obama, when he was a senator, was very supportive of those oversight efforts, and if it's good for those programs, surely it's good enough to have that level of scrutiny for a program that's going to cost $1.8 trillion and literally have an impact on every single American."
Roskam claimed that he has already received strong positive feedback from the committees of jurisdiction that the bill will move forward.
"I'm confident that the House is going to be able to move it, and then the question becomes what happens in the Senate. In my view, if I were a Democratic senator who's up for election this fall in a state that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan won, and I've got a recalcitrant White House that's not bending on any of its healthcare orthodoxy and I need to separate myself from the White House, I would be all over this thing," he said.
"I would be all over this type of scrutiny and this type of examination because it just makes sense that the American public gets the information that they need and that the administration is held to account for literally a trillion dollars."
Roskam has represented Illinois's 6th congressional district since 2007 and served previously in the Illinois Senate and the Illinois House of Representatives.
He insisted that the oversight already in place for Obamacare is not sufficient. " You've got an inspector general for health and human services, you've got an inspector general for this little area and that little area, but they can't talk to one another. Nobody's got subpoena power, nobody's got the ability on an independent basis to get this information, and what we're saying is, 'look, this is such a big program. The American public has the right to know where the money is going.'"
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