Healthcare

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I would like to respond to my colleague and friend from Wyoming and just note one thing that happened last Sunday that, I think, puts this whole debate into perspective.

I go into a restaurant in the Loop in Chicago. My wife and I have breakfast there regularly. It is well known. It is named Lou Mitchell's. Lou Mitchell's restaurant claims they are the beginning of Route 66 in America. Tourists come from all over the world to travel Route 66, and they start at Lou Mitchell's. Well, that is where my wife and I start with breakfast on Sunday morning. And we have a favorite waitress whom we have been working with for years, and a lady who serves as maitre d' who is 94 years old. She comes to work every day. It is a great place. It is a real slice of America, a real slice of Chicago. It is usually a pretty happy place, too--rooting for the Bears and talking about upcoming holidays.

It wasn't that way with my friend the waitress--I will call her Sara--last Sunday. She came over to me and said: Senator, do you know what is going to happen to my health insurance on January 1? And I said: No.

And she said: I am going to have to pay 3 or $400 more a month for me and my husband under the Affordable Care Act. What happened? How can I possibly pay that amount of money as a working waitress?

She is 63 years old. She has been working as a waitress for years, and she has had a ton of medical problems. I know that as a fact.

And I said to her: Well, what happened was, we didn't approve the continuation of the tax treatment for your health insurance premium. There was a dispute in the Congress over that issue, and we will have our chance this week on Thursday, when there is going to be a vote on whether we give you the tax credit that you have been receiving for years to help you pay your health insurance premiums or not. If we can get 13 Republicans to join us, we could continue to pay that basic helping hand for you and for so many others who work hard, and that is the only way you can get health insurance.

She said: I don't know what I will do if you don't change the law.

And I said: I don't know either.

I thought, when I left her, that at least we would have a chance for a bipartisan response to solve this problem. The speech just given by my friend--and he is my friend--and colleague from Wyoming tells me that there is little chance that this is going to happen. When it is all over, Sara is going to face a health insurance bill which she can't pay as a waitress--a working waitress. I don't know what she will do. I suspect she will just have to cancel her insurance coverage at a time when she still has some serious medical problems. That is the reality of it.

So I would say to my friend from Wyoming, there is plenty of opportunity for your party, as the majority party in the U.S. Senate, to call a hearing and address any changes you want to make in the Affordable Care Act. If you believe there is fraud, and we can establish it, count me in. Let's do it together. Let's make it bipartisan. I don't want to waste a taxpayer's dollar, and I want to provide real healthcare to people who otherwise can't afford it. We need to do that.

In the meantime, what are we going to do about Sara's health insurance premium that in 2 or 3 weeks is going to go up and almost double. What is she going to do about it? Shouldn't we care about her first?

This is really a triage, and the first thing to do is to help Sara, make sure that her family has health insurance coverage.

The second thing we do in the triage is address changes in the system. I am open to them. I think some of the things that were said on the floor probably exaggerated the situation, but I am open to any changes which want to be suggested that will improve this system. But let's start with this triage by helping Sara, the waitress at Lou Mitchell's in the city of Chicago--make sure that she has health insurance when it is all over.

Give us those 13 votes and call for the first meeting of the Congress in the next calendar year to address any fraud in the system we can find and deal with it openly and directly. But don't walk away from 24 million Americans who count on this as an avenue for health insurance and say that because there is fraud in the system committed by insurance companies or insurance brokers, we are going to show you; we are going to basically say Sara gets no health insurance. That is wrong. It is just plain wrong.

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