The People's Night: Obamacare

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend, the gentleman from North Carolina, for his leadership not only of the RepublicanStudy Committee as the new chairman--and I welcome you as the new chairman of the Republican Study Committee--but for hisleadership on issues related to the importance of repealing this disastrous law that is making life harder on the Americanpeople; and not just repealing it, but replacing it with policy ideas that put power back in the hands of patients, theirfamilies, and their doctors instead of driving up costs, forcing people to lose their healthcare plans, forcing the governmentto ration health care. We need a better way.

I am proud to say that we are supporting not just repealing ObamaCare here tonight, but bringing to the American people someconstructive, positive ideas that will make life easier for them and improve their lives through better patient-centered healthcare.

Mr. Speaker, Kentucky was once portrayed by President Obama, a red State, as a model of the implementation of ObamaCare.Yet, every day in Kentucky, in my district in central and eastern Kentucky, I hear stories from families and small businessesand individuals who have been hurt by this disastrous law.

Now, over the next few weeks, as President-elect Trump comes into office and as this Congress revisits the issue ofhealthcare reform, I expect we will hear from our friends on the other side of the aisle, arguments like ``Don't repealObamaCare. We have 20 million new Americans who have insurance.''

But that statistic needs to be scrutinized because the truth of the matter is ObamaCare forced people to lose their healthcare. In many cases, and in Kentucky as an example, many of my constituents lost high-quality, private, commercial healthinsurance through their workplace, and millions of Americans received cancellation notices in the mail. Their small employerstold them that they were going to have to change their health plans because of this law.

So not only do we see now skyrocketing costs for those who currently have health insurance, but many Americans who ourfriends on the other side of the aisle say now are insured or covered, these are folks who lost their health insurance before.

What happened?

They lost high-quality, job-based health insurance, and so they were forced into these exchanges. In Kentucky it was calledKynect. In many cases, they went to the cheapest plan available, which happened to be Medicaid. Well, my fellow Americans,access to a waiting line is not access to health care. Unfortunately, Medicaid is oftentimes access to a waiting line, and it isnot access to true health care.

President Obama's promise that his healthcare law would help people has not turned out to be the case. In terms of cost,remember, this is called the Affordable Care Act, but it is anything but affordable because even though he promised thatpremiums would decline by $2,500 a year for the average family, premiums have actually increased for hardworkingAmericans. Premiums have increased for 11 million people, according to a report by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.Millions of Americans, as I said before, lost previous coverage or had to change doctors due to this disastrous law.

Take, for example, Laura in my congressional district in Kentucky.

Laura is a young mother who had a baby girl, Catherine.Catherine was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect, ventricular septal defect at birth, which is basically a hole in thewall of the heart. They needed high-quality pediatric cardiology to help Catherine. So they got a specialist at BostonChildren's Hospital. Of course, a long way away from Kentucky, but they wanted the best, of course, for their daughter.

WhenObamaCare went into effect, unfortunately they lost their job-based health insurance that allowed them to access thesespecialists up in Boston for Catherine. The result was, they lost their doctor.

What do you think a young mother and a young father are going to do in that situation?
Guess what, they had to find a very expensive policy to cover a Boston surgeon out of network out of State, and so theircosts skyrocketed.

This is the kind of thing that was happening to millions of Americans as a result of ObamaCare.

Look, ObamaCare obviously reduced choice and competition. There are now only three plans participating in the ObamaCareexchange in Kentucky, one of which covers a full 78 percent of the State's individual marketplace enrollees. In many Statesthere is only one plan on the exchange. This has left too many families with no choice but to purchase high-deductible, high-premium coverage. In Kentucky, insurance plans have been forced to raise premiums by 23 percent in 2017 alone.

There is a better way, and the better way is healthcare reform that is focused on the patient, not putting bureaucrats in charge, not taking away choices, not driving up costs, not creating narrow networks for people, not forcing people out of their high-quality private health insurance into government-run health care, but, instead, empowering patients to access more affordable private coverage.

And one of the ways we can lower the cost of health care, make it more affordable for people to access high-quality private health insurance, is medical malpractice reform.

Frivolous lawsuits, junk lawsuits, have driven up the cost of health care in this country significantly. One of the fatal flaws of ObamaCare is that it never addressed this cost of healthcare inflation.

Over the course of their careers, it is estimated that 75 percent of all physicians will face a malpractice claim. Now, tobe sure, some of those cases of medical negligence are legitimate. And, of course, those plaintiffs should be able to fully recover damages for those cases of genuine actual malpractice. But for these frivolous lawsuits, that is driving up the cost of care. The fact that ObamaCare never even dealt with that issue is a fundamental flaw in the previous efforts to reform our healthcare system.

So I am a proud cosponsor of the Republican Study Committee's America Health Care Reform Act. In the American Health CareReform Act is legislation that I introduced with Senator Barrasso called the Saving Lives, Saving Costs Act. This doesn' t cap damages for cases of actual malpractice, but if there is a frivolous claim, if the liability climate is producing frivolous lawsuits, what we say is this: If you are a hospital or a doctor or a nurse and you practice in accordance with peer reviewed,evidence-based clinical practice guidelines, that there should be a higher standard of proof for that plaintiff to get to a jury trial.

We want a safe harbor for our outstanding medical professionals who practice in accordance with the latest state-of-the-art guidelines on how to take care of patients.

So this does two things. Number one, it raises the standard of care.

We are helping people access better, higher-quality medicine in this country with this legislation; and we are cutting out frivolous lawsuits, this litigation lottery that is driving up the cost of health care for all Americans.

This is the kind of reform that, if enacted, would replace ObamaCare with reforms that would actually lower the cost of health care without growing government.

I applaud the efforts of the Republican Study Committee for offering real solutions that will put patients and doctors in charge again and not Washington, D.C.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source