Breaking the Gridlock Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. KENNEDY of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Missouri for this time.

As a family practice doctor for more than 25 years, I hear directly from my patients about the skyrocketing cost of insurance and prescription drugs. Americans were promised lower costs, more choices, and better care. More than a decade later, too many families are asking what happened.

Since its passage, the unaffordable care act has created a subsidy- fueled illusion with spiraling costs hidden by taxpayer dollars and deficit spending.

Today, many Americans have insurance on paper but still cannot afford to use it. Plans often come with deductibles of several thousand dollars, meaning families pay out of pocket for most routine care. Insurance that cannot be used when people are sick is not real security. It is an illusion.

Let's look at the facts. Healthcare costs have skyrocketed since ObamaCare went into effect. The ACA promised to lower healthcare premiums by up to $2,500 per family per year, but since ObamaCare went into effect, premiums have nearly tripled and deductibles have nearly doubled. The cost of coverage for a family of 4 has increased by more than $10,000.

The benchmark ACA silver plan cost $346 a month in 2014. In 2026, the same exact plan costs $625 a month. The benchmark ACA silver plan deductible was $2,425 in 2014. In 2026, the average deductible will be $5,304, a 119 percent increase. That means that before your health insurance even kicks in, you have to incur $5,304 in out-of-pocket costs.

Such deductibles leave families effectively self-funding their care despite being insured. A policy that you can't afford when you are sick is not a real solution, only an illusion of coverage, leaving individuals functionally uninsured.

Compounding these design failures are serious fraud and enforcement breakdowns within the system itself. A 2024 GAO investigation found that fake identities were approved for ObamaCare subsidies at a 100 percent rate. Often remaining enrolled despite missing or falsified documentation, these ObamaCare subsidies continued for these fraudulent applications. Taxpayers are left footing the bill as reused Social Security numbers, subsidies paid on behalf of deceased individuals, and billions in unreconciled payments expose a system unable to protect public funds.

To be clear, expanding access to health insurance and protecting people with preexisting conditions are worthy goals, but good intentions do not excuse bad results.

Mr. Speaker, faced with these affordability problems, what have my Democratic colleagues proposed? Their answer has been more taxpayer subsidies to paper over ObamaCare's problems. Rather than address the root causes of high premiums, they want to pour ever-larger subsidies to insurance companies to mask the broken system.

Extending subsidies without reform is just paying more for a broken system. I am not going to vote to promote a broken ObamaCare system. If health insurance only looks affordable when Washington pumps in billions of temporary subsidies, the law itself is not affordable. That structure is the real problem that we need to fix. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no.''

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