House Obamacare Repeal Passes

It won't make any difference to your insurance premiums, which will go up; or to the individual mandate tax, which you will have to pay; or to the quality of U.S. health care, which will decline. 

But the House of Representatives has voted to repeal ObamaCare (live C-SPAN coverage). The Republican-controlled body will symbolically do what all the laws of the land were unable to do — prevent President Obama's ill-conceived and scandalously adopted law from making life in this country suck even more. 

Five Democrats joined the repeal vote: Dan Boren (Okla.), Mike McIntyre (N.C.), Larry Kissell (N.C.), Mike Ross (Ark.),  and one I couldn't hear (maybe Pennsylvania's Tim Holden?). 

Media reactions: 

ABC's John Parkinson says this is the 33rd attempt to repeal since the original law was passed in a sordid backstairs intrigue on a Saturday night. 

Hoo-larious funmaker Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (that's what old-timers used to call a newspaper) says the Republicans are stabbing a voodoo doll. (Racist!) 

And from the land of the fantastically efficient National Health Service, the Guardian's Thomas Rogan calls it an empty gesture.