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Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, let me go to the policy issue. I know this is very important to my colleague from Florida. And when families are wrestling with this issue, they have the sympathies of all of us.

Here is what concerns me: Families struggling to afford IVF will get virtually no benefit from the Scott proposal that more than doubles the annual contribution limit. That is the bottom line. Families struggling get virtually nothing from this.

I have just felt--and I am sorry that we started a little bit early because I wanted to hear Senator Scott's remarks. I just think, if you look overall, Republicans have just had no interest in protecting in vitro fertilization or reproductive rights.

The fact is, Donald Trump, some time ago, claimed that he was going to require insurers to cover IVF. As far as I can tell, not Senator Scott, but Republicans generally basically never thought he was serious about it, which is the case for all of these proposals, virtually, that he is making, sometimes more than one a week.

So my view is, the money that this bill would cost is better spent on extending the expansion of the Affordable Care Act's premium tax credits because they actually lower the cost of health insurance for typical families. That is what we want to do: lower the cost of health insurance for typical families. By the way, that is set to expire at the end of next year unless Congress takes action.

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