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Floor Speech
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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, I am so pleased that my colleague from Oklahoma is on the floor and is talking about this issue that affects so many Americans. Indeed, in Tennessee, we have seen the impact of this.
As my colleague mentioned, our friends across the aisle have done what we call kicking the can when it comes to healthcare. ObamaCare is too expensive to afford--that is something that has been proven--but instead of dealing with root causes, they are saying: Let's just extend the COVID-era subsidies for another 3 years, and then we will talk about it.
He also mentioned triggering that date during a Presidential election--doing nothing to reform the abuse that you are finding in the system and just kicking the can and saying: Let's do these subsidies. Let's not worry about it.
Well, you know, that is not something that Tennesseans are wanting to see, and as many have reminded me, they are the exact same subsidies that the Democrats used as a smokescreen to carry out their 43-day government shutdown. But at the end of all of this, they don't want to do anything about it even though we have information and have seen research that, by extending these pandemic-era subsidies--and by the way, COVID is over; the pandemic is over, but they want to continue to fund it like it is still going on. These subsidies have been plagued by waste, fraud, and abuse, and what they are doing would cost taxpayers $35 billion a year to do nothing more than line the pockets and the profits of insurance companies.
We know that there is an incredible amount of fraud. There are 6.4 million people fraudulently enrolled. We know that it is hard-working taxpayers who are paying for this and that the Democrats' solution would do nothing to clean up the program. It would do nothing to lower the cost of healthcare. It would continue the status quo, and individuals who are enrolled in ObamaCare would continue to see their costs go up.
So what we have said is, the original ObamaCare subsidies--by the way, I want to be very clear on this. Those subsidies are law. They do not go away. The only things that are going away are the Biden-era COVID subsidies. The Democrats put those in place in 2021. They were to expire in 2022, but then they decided, no, let's make them expire on December 31, 2025. So they created this problem. They created the problem with ObamaCare. Not one Republican voted for it in either the House or the Senate, and now they have created another problem.
They have done all of this because they didn't want to address the flaws that were in the program. Well, under the Biden COVID-era credits, people who were making over $500,000 a year could benefit from the taxpayer-funded subsidies. Originally, with the original ObamaCare subsidies, you get the credit up to 400 percent of poverty, but the Democrats said: No. Let's make it a free-for-all. Let's just get these out here, the zero premiums--yes, that sounds great; that is what they wanted to push for some people--and up to $500,000 a year in income, $500,000 a year. You, too, could get a taxpayer-funded subsidy to help pay for your insurance. Maybe 80 percent was paid or 90 percent was paid, but this is not what the American people want. Instead of lowering costs, these subsidies are continuing to prop up a very broken system, and that is why the cost continues to go up.
Since 2013, the ObamaCare benchmark plan premium has increased by more than 200 percent. In Tennessee, you have seen about a 20-percent increase. Now, this ObamaCare plan is going up more than 300 times the rate of employee-sponsored plans, so the taxpayers are on the hook for this.
So why is it that they continue to go up? It is because of government interference and the mandates that Democrats passed when they passed ObamaCare. It is too expensive to afford.
During the Schumer shutdown, I spoke in this very Chamber about the fraud that was connected to the Biden COVID credits. Last week, the U.S. Government Accountability Office actually released findings that showed just how easy it was to commit fraud with these subsidies. The GAO conducted an undercover test. They had heard anecdotally about some of this fraud, but the GAO, which is nonpartisan, said: Let's get into this. Let's dive in. Let's do an undercover test.
So they submitted applications for these Biden subsidies for 24 fictitious individuals, for people who don't exist, with addresses that are not accurate and names and Social Security numbers that are not accurate. Each application had false and missing information on identities and incomes. They just made it up. So they ran their test. To their surprise--get this--they didn't have one or two people who were approved or even half of the people--a dozen--of these fictitious people who made it through. They had 23 of the 24 fake people approved. They had fake identities and fake income--nothing was real--but ObamaCare approved 23 of the 24 applications. The U.S. taxpayer who is footing the bill for this paid more than $10,000 a month to insurance companies to provide for these people who don't exist, for these fictitious enrollees. Think about that--$10,000 a month.
A preliminary analysis by the GAO found that there were at least 190,000 applications between 2023 and 2024 that had unauthorized changes by agents or brokers. That means people didn't know that they were enrolled or they didn't know that changes on income and personal data had been made to their applications. Over the same period, there were close to 100,000 duplicate Social Security numbers enrolled in the program. So you have a broker or somebody who is enrolling people. They get a Social Security number, and they are going to town with it. They are wearing that thing out.
So you have got 100,000 duplicate numbers enrolled in the program. In one case, a single Social Security number--one number--was used to apply for more than 125 policies.
I call that fraud. And I think it is amazing that ObamaCare is so poorly run that they are allowing this level of fraud and waste of your tax dollars, which are paying for every bit of this.
This is a program that now our colleagues across the aisle are saying: We don't want to fix it. We just want to kick the can. We want to extend these subsidies for 3 more years because the program is really expensive.
And why is it expensive? Waste, fraud, abuse, and government mandates. And ObamaCare is too expensive to afford.
Now, Republicans have already started to address the root cause of the issue, and in the Big Beautiful Bill, there are provisions that require individuals who misstate their income to repay the excess subsidy amount in full.
Requiring applicants to verify their income, their family size, their immigration status, and residence before enrolling ensures no one can abuse the system at the expense of American taxpayers.
This is what you call old common sense. If you are going to go apply for a credit card or a loan at the bank, you have got to verify this, and you are going to be held legally responsible.
Under ObamaCare, it is like nobody gave a ripping flip about what you put on the paper. Whatever you said, all right--there was no verification that was done.
Republicans are also working on solutions to lower the cost--how about that one?--and to promote healthcare freedom, to let you, the patient, the individual, have more choice, more options, and make decisions that affect your healthcare.
This week, our Finance Committee chairman, Senator Crapo, and the Health Committee chairman, Senator Cassidy, introduced legislation that would direct funds directly to patients, not to insurance companies. Well, how about that?
Let's make certain that patients--patients--are the ones who receive those funds, not the insurance companies, because we have already defined the waste, the fraud, and the abuse that is taking place in the program.
Now, doing this through health savings accounts and funding for cost- sharing reduction payments, these are things that are positive, that would help to bring some transparency to the system.
Unlike the Democrat proposal, which only further adds to our $38 trillion in debt, the Crapo-Cassidy bill would drive down the cost of premiums and provide an off-ramp for the Biden plussed-up bonus COVID credits for individuals that were making six-figure incomes.
Now, last week, I introduced a package of bills to support and expand Tennessee's Medicaid innovation, including the Medicaid Primary Care Improvement Act, which would allow States to use Medicaid dollars to pay for direct primary care arrangements, expanding healthcare access for Medicaid beneficiaries and improving outcomes.
And we are introducing legislation that I have worked on for years to empower citizens to purchase health insurance across State lines and have portability on policies. If they get a policy that works, that they like, that they can afford, allow them to take that policy with them, regardless of where they live--again, common sense.
We do know this: You have got to promote competition so that we can bring down prices and give consumers--individuals, patients--more power to price shop for affordable plans.
Americans do not want the Federal Government in charge of their healthcare. They do not want socialized medicine. They do not want government-run healthcare plans. And they definitely do not want their hard-earned tax dollars underwriting fraud.
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