Republicans see way to repeal Obamacare Rallying to the cause: Republican candidate Mitt Romney has been leading the race for the backing of the wealthy Republican leaders in Congress said they could overturn Barack Obama's healthcare law with a razor-thin majority if Mitt Romney wins the White House and that it would fall to individual states to preserve a critical patient protection in the law. At the same time, Democrats were seeking to insulate themselves from critic­ism that "Obamacare" imposed a new tax on the middle class - a charge that has emerged from the Supreme Court decision on the legality of the law - by rebranding the legislation as one that punished "free riders" in the insurance system. IN US Politics & Policy Mr Romney, the Republican nominee for president, promised in the aftermath of the court ruling last week that he would "act to repeal Obamacare" on his first day in office. While the former Massachusetts governor has been short on details, the top Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, said on Fox News that Republicans would use the same legislative manoeuvre to undo Obamacare that Democrats used to pass it in 2010. This scenario presumes that if Mr Romney were to win, Republicans would also have won at least a slim majority in the Senate. They are currently in the minority. That would give Republicans the opportunity to use the process of "reconciliation," a mechanism used to pass budgetary items in the Congress by a 51-member majority, to overturn parts of the law that affect the federal budget. Most experts agree that it would be difficult to repeal the entire law using reconciliation but that chunks of the law could be gutted this way. The fact that the Supreme Court upheld the law, on the grounds that the individual mandate placing financial penalties on Americans who do not buy insurance was a tax, bolsters that argument. But the prospect of using this complicated mechanism also carries political risk and puts the onus on Mr Romney and Republicans in Congress to shed more light on how they would address serious flaws in the healthcare system. It is also far from clear whether reconciliation could be used to roll back popular consumer protections, which are paid for through the enforcement of the unpopular individual mandate, compelling almost all US citizens to buy insurance from 2014. Pressed by a reporter, Mr McConnell said on Sunday that Republicans would not seek to expand health insurance to 30m uninsured US citizens through the government. "That is not the issue," he said. We're not going to turn it into a western European style of healthcare. Both Mr McConnell and John Boehner, the Republican House Speaker, suggested that it was not the federal government's job to ensure that patients with pre-existing medical conditions were guaranteed insurance coverage, one of the most popular provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Both said that job should be left to individual states, which could set up "high risk" insurance pools for affected patients. The view is shared by Mr Romney, who has also said he supports reforms to protect patients with pre-existing medical conditions from being denied health insurance if they have had continuous coverage. Republicans have said "modest reforms" they support include a plan to allow consumers to buy insurance across state lines and legal reform to limit medical malpractice suits. Paul Ryan, the Republican who heads the House budget committee, said on ABC that the healthcare ruling raised the stakes in the election, which he called a "choice of two futures" between "government-rationed healthcare" and "personal liberty." Even as they basked in their victory this week, Democrats were coping with a political headache that was set off by the Supreme Court decision: the fact that Chief Justice John Roberts decisive vote to uphold the law was predicated on classifying the individual insurance mandate as a tax. The Republicans have pounced on that label, and juxtaposed it against previous claims by Mr Obama that the law was not a tax. Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House and an architect of the law, fired back by saying that the tax - she still insisted on calling it a "financial penalty" - would hit only individuals who had the means to buy insurance but were purposefully not doing so because they were "free riders," an argument that has so far been avoided by Democrats.