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Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, preventing people from losing their healthcare should not be a partisan issue because outside of the four corners of this Capitol, it should not matter if you are a Democrat or a Republican or an Independent--we should all not want people to have spikes in their health insurance costs.
In a matter of days, tens of millions of people all across the country are going to get letters in the mail, saying: Your monthly premium, starting January 1, is going to be more than double what you pay now--more than double.
That is not my speculating. That is not my allegation. That is not a political talking point that was cooked up in some Democratic lab. That is what the Kaiser Family Foundation analysis shows, that premiums will increase on average by 114 percent per person--not 14 percent; 114 percent.
That is just the average. Some people's rates will be changed based on their income level. Say you make $35,000 a year. You are now going to be paying almost $1,600 more per year for coverage. And if you are a family of four making 75 grand, you are going to be paying more than 3,000 extra dollars.
I just encourage everybody who is watching--all of my colleagues, all of the staff, all of the members of the media--to talk to anyone in your hometown. Most people just don't have that kind of money lying around. If you are a family living paycheck to paycheck, if you are a young couple saving up to buy a home, if you are a small business owner already cutting back on costs because everything is more expensive now, what are you supposed to do?
This is not a crisis the Democrats have cooked up to score political points. The reason for the urgency is that October 1 is the day that people are going to get letters from their insurance carriers telling them that this is happening. Open enrollment begins in exactly a month.
People are scared about how they are going to pay for their healthcare or if they are going to have it at all. There are a lot of people who just can't absorb this extra cost. It is not like you can buy a little less of something. When you are at the grocery store--for instance, vegetables are now 39 percent more expensive. Well, you still have some money in your pocket. You are going to buy fewer vegetables and more of the cheap stuff, which is why, by the way, Hamburger Helper purchases have spiked.
So people are making these adjustments to the fact that everything has gotten more expensive, but with health insurance, you can't turn the dial like that. You can't buy a little less health insurance. You either can absorb the cost or you cannot, and if you cannot, you will go without health insurance.
Here is the thing that people need to understand: This directly impacts about 24 million people, OK? That is enough for us to, like, pay enough attention and try to come up with a bipartisan solution. But the truth is that we already know what happens when people lose their health insurance, right? They end up getting sicker and sicker, and at some point, they present themselves to emergency rooms.
Everybody understands--kind of intuitively, but there is plenty of data to back this up--that when you present yourself at an emergency room when you are already supersick, you require a bunch of very expensive interventions, and that cost is distributed among the rest of us who still have insurance.
So it is not just the 24 million Americans who are going to pay more for health insurance and some number of millions of those Americans who are just not going to have insurance at all, it is also a mathematical certainty that the increased stupidity of the system, the increased extent to which the system now makes even less sense than it does already--we are all going to eat the cost, whether you are on the so- called exchange or not.
Look, Republicans are in charge of Washington. We lost the election. Elections--consequences. I get it. When we had the trifecta, we did a bunch of things to reduce the price of prescription medicine, to build infrastructure, to fix the post office, to do the Respect for Marriage Act, to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. We did a bunch of stuff, and Republicans are doing a bunch of stuff, but we are trying to hand our Republican colleagues a lifeline because prices are going to spike everywhere.
I said this yesterday, and I mean this: If we were a little more cynical, we might just say ``This is your problem; why don't you guys just stew in it?'' because this is, frankly, electorally, a very powerful issue. People are going to be really pissed when they get these letters in the mail. They really are. So the supercynical, election-oriented thing for us to do would be simply to say ``Good luck with all that.''
But maybe it is the strength of the Democratic caucus, maybe it is the weakness of the Democratic caucus, but we just care too much about people to let that happen. So we are simply asking, in the context of this shutdown, to jump-start a negotiation about how to prevent a 114- percent increase in the cost of healthcare for 24 million Americans.
Look, the cost of electricity is not just up; it is double the inflation rate. The cost of groceries is spiking. The cost of raw materials to build a house--spiking. The cost of basically anything you want to buy at a Walmart or a Costco or a Target or a Safeway or a Food Lion or wherever you go is spiking. All of that is a consequence of both inflation and tariffs. But this thing is a public policy. This is intentional to spike these rates.
We are saying: Are you guys sure you want to do this?
We are about to find out whether they are sure that they want to impose a doubling of insurance costs on 24 million Americans.
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