Healthcare

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, many of us bring life experiences to the Senate Chamber, and it shapes our judgment on critical issues.

When I was first married, my wife and I were blessed with a beautiful little baby girl. I was going to law school here in Washington, DC. It turns out that our little girl had a serious, serious medical problem.

The difficulty I faced was the fact that I had no health insurance. I was a law student, and I ended up going to Children's Hospital here in Washington, DC, with my wife and our little baby girl and sitting in the charity ward, which basically was there for people who couldn't pay their medical bills and had no health insurance. We waited for the door to open and for our family name to be called out to meet, for the first time, the doctor who was going to treat my little girl.

I never felt more helpless in my life, as a father, to have that baby with that medical problem and to have no health insurance. I am sure that colored my judgment the rest of my life and my service of over 40 years in Congress.

I have always voted to give families a better chance of having health insurance. Having lived without it, I value it so much. It has been a major part of my feelings about healthcare and about the role of Congress.

And so then, 15 years ago, when President Obama, my former colleague from Illinois, was President of the United States and set out to achieve something that had never been done in the United States--to dramatically expand the coverage of health insurance to families that otherwise wouldn't qualify under the existing law or couldn't afford it--I worked hard to pass that bill. It took us a long time and a lot of effort.

I was whip of the Senate Democrats at that point, and I used to go to Harry Reid's office several times a day to talk about the next step in passing the Affordable Care Act.

The day finally came. I won't dwell on the minutia or the details of how we reached, but we did it. Unfortunately, throughout that process, we never--never--had one Republican vote of support, ever. We were fortunate to have 60 Democrats at the right moment politically to pass a bill in the U.S. Senate.

I was sorry that the Republicans didn't join us in this effort. They could have made a better bill out of it--I am sure of it--if they had joined us, but they decided not to.

And so, for the last 15 years, the Affordable Care Act has offered to millions of Americans health insurance coverage, which was unthinkable before it passed.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

There was a time when health insurance plans in the United States, before the Affordable Care Act, didn't cover mental health issues or addiction issues. You think to yourself, well, those are serious issues. They affect people's health. Why wouldn't they cover it? Because they are expensive, and they didn't want to.

But two Senators came out on the floor here--one a Democrat, Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, and the other a Republican, Pete Domenici of New Mexico--and pushed to include as a requirement, in all health insurance plans, that they cover mental illness.

I supported that. My family, like most families, has a story to tell when it comes to mental illness, and I viewed it as an issue of health, not an issue of a curse that a person has to try to outlive. So we included it. Thank goodness we did. Not only did mental illness have health insurance coverage, but the addiction problem did as well. Just at the time, we entered into the opioid addiction, which swamped the United States and needed this kind of response in Congress. That was one thing.

The second thing, before the Affordable Care Act, if you had any history of any illness, coverage would be excluded for that illness when you got your health insurance plan. So most plans were worthless for people who came into the market looking for healthcare coverage if they had any history whatsoever. That was eliminated, and I am glad it was.

We also extended health insurance coverage for children of families to age 26. The belief was simple: When your child, your son or your daughter, graduates college and starts looking for a job, they may not have luck at the outset. They may not have a full-time job when they finally do find employment. And they probably, in those days, had no health insurance offered to them as part-time employees. So we let young people stay under their family health insurance plan until they reached the age of 26.

Those are the types of things that have been decried by many Republicans as socialism, too much government, too much regulation. But it meant that the health insurance market was actually worth something to families who otherwise were excluded from it or found it too expensive.

As I said, we passed that major legislation 15 years ago--roughly 15 years ago--at a time when not a single Republican would support it.

Now we are back into a period--and I listened closely to the Republican leader this morning--where we are asking: What are we going to do moving forward?

Here is the problem: For those people who had limited income, health insurance was beyond their reach. And so we offered a tax break--a tax credit--for people to help pay their health insurance premiums. Otherwise, they were too expensive. That health insurance tax credit helped millions of American families afford health insurance, and we moved forward.

But there came a time when the Republicans had a chance, with their own majority, to address the Affordable Care Act, and they started eliminating that health insurance credit.

As a consequence, many families--24 million, we believe, nationwide-- face the prospect that their health insurance premiums are going to be too high and increase dramatically, beyond their reach in family income.

And that is exactly what is happening. Families across America who qualify for the Affordable Care Act health insurance tax credit are learning that their health insurance premiums are going up dramatically. I receive letters and contacts from people in Illinois, which I will put in the record in just a moment here.

But Senator Thune, who is a friend and the Republican leader of the Senate, came to the floor this morning and pointed to two areas he thinks needed to be changed in the Affordable Care Act. One is whether your income level should be taken into consideration for the tax credit, and I believe it should and he does, too, I think. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but that is what I understood him to say this morning. Secondly, that there are zero premium policies that are being taken advantage of by some unethical people.

I think those are two legitimate areas of debate. I want to offer, as a Democratic Senator, my good offices and personal effort to try to fix those two problems if it means we can come together and restore tax credits for families that otherwise cannot afford their health insurance premiums. We are going to have a chance to do it.

And it was Senator Thune who created that chance. He said the Democrats could offer a basic bill to improve the system, which I am sure we will. And I hope that the Republicans may offer amendments to it or may have their own approach that we can debate leading into it. The problem is, we have precious little time. It is supposed to be done before December 12, and that is only a few days away. Some of these changes are significant. We ought to take a little time to make sure we get them right.

I am just saying, as an offer--and I hope the American people follow this closely--this Democrat, and I am sure others as well on my side of the aisle, will sit down with Senator Thune to try to address the problems that he raised this morning. They are legitimate concerns. We may see them a little differently, but let's discuss it.

Let's do something we hardly ever do in the U.S. Senate anymore: Let's legislate. Let's do it on a bipartisan basis. They don't have 60 votes on their side of the aisle, nor do we. But if we come together, we can muster 60 votes for a good change and say to millions of Americans with health insurance premiums they can't afford that there is a way out of this.

Let us extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits with some changes, as suggested, but do it for a period of time that is reasonable and gives people peace of mind. If we are concerned about the cost of living and family budgets, for goodness' sake, it starts with healthcare. Health insurance premiums can be so high, people have no choice.

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