Keep Student Loans Affordable Act of 2013 - Motion to Proceed
Floor Speech
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Mr. THUNE. Last week on July 2, the Tuesday before the Fourth of July Independence Day on Thursday, the administration made an announcement that they were going to delay implementation of a key component of the ObamaCare law. I think that came as a surprise to a lot of people because the expectation has been all along that in January of this next year many of the provisions in that law were going to go into effect.
Tomorrow, a majority of the Senate Republican conference will be sending a letter to President Obama asking for a permanent delay of the employer mandate. I say permanent delay because they talked about delaying it for 1 year. In making the announcement about the delay of the employer mandate, the administration unilaterally acted and failed to work with Congress on what is a very significant decision.
This action finally acknowledges some of the many burdens this law will place on job creators. I believe the rest of this law should be permanently delayed for all Americans in order to avoid significant economic harm to American families.
In response to questions about the administration's decision, the President's senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said, ``We are listening,'' while referring to the concerns of the business community over the onerous employer mandate that will result in fewer jobs and employees working fewer hours.
We have been listening as well. As more employers have attempted to understand the burdensome requirements in the President's health care law, the louder their outrage has become. In particular, small- to medium-sized businesses are simply drowning, drowning in their efforts to understand all of the regulations.
We are also listening to the views of the American people. A recent Gallup poll from this week showed that a majority of Americans still disapprove of the health care law. The survey showed that 55 percent of respondents disapprove of ObamaCare.
A Gallup survey last month revealed for every one person who believes they will be better off under ObamaCare, two believe they will be worse off.
Opposition to the health care law is growing and it will continue to grow as more Americans realize the law is built upon broken promises and will result in higher health care costs and more taxes.
Under the individual mandate, the IRS, which is still under multiple investigations for unfairly targeting conservative groups, will play a central role in the implementation of the health care law in our country. Last fall the Congressional Budget Office estimated nearly 6 million Americans, primarily in the middle class, will have to pay a tax under the individual mandate, which was 2 million more than were initially estimated.
When the Affordable Care Act is fully implemented, the average individual mandate tax will be nearly $1,200, which clearly--clearly--contradicts the President's previous statement that the individual mandate is ``absolutely not a tax increase.''
Further, families are facing significant increases in premiums. The Wall Street Journal recently published an analysis of premiums and concluded under the health care law some Americans will see their premiums double or even triple, which is the opposite of the promise that was made by the President that premiums would go down by $2,500 for American families.
Given the widely held belief by the American people the Affordable Care Act will not fulfill its promises and will result in higher costs for American families, I believe this law should be permanently delayed. This law is unworkable, harmful to the economy and to American families, and action to delay the employer mandate is an acknowledgment of that very fact.
Public opinion about the Affordable Care Act has been consistently low. Perhaps Americans don't like it because it is affecting their jobs. Four in ten small business owners say they have held back in hiring, and one in five owners says they have let employees go due to the health care costs associated with the Affordable Care Act. As implementation of the law continues, the number of small business owners who take these steps could increase.
Employers are also cutting back on hours in anticipation of the mandate. Even though enforcement of the employer mandate may be delayed, employers still know this is coming down the pike and will continue to make adjustments to their workforce in anticipation of the new mandates.
A new mandate will also be imposed on individual Americans. On January 1, Americans will be forced by their government to buy a product--health insurance--for the first time ever. This mandate will be enforced by tax penalties administered through the Internal Revenue Service. The Obama administration has requested over $400 million in funding and nearly 2,000 bureaucrats for the IRS to implement the individual mandate and 46 other statutory provisions.
The blizzard of ObamaCare rules and regulations continues. Regulators have now written over 20,000 pages of ObamaCare-related rules and notices in the Federal Register. And just this last week another 606 pages of new regulations were released that were designed to assist in implementing this massive law. It is no wonder the public outcry from employers was so loudly opposed to the employer mandate.
American families are also struggling to understand how this complex, burdensome law will affect them. It is critical the President and his administration listen to the American people and permanently delay this law.
I would add that if we look at the impact on the economy, not only is this about higher premiums for middle-class families in this country, not only is it about higher taxes that are going to be imposed upon medical device manufacturers, on health insurance plans, pharmaceutical companies--all of which, by the way, will be passed on to individual consumers--it is also about the impact this will have on jobs and the economy. If we look at the numbers that came out last week and what they said about the impact of policies coming out of Washington, DC, and the impact they are having on jobs in this country, the number of people working part time for economic reasons--sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers--increased by 322,000 people to 8.2 million total people in the month of June. These are people who are working part time because their hours have been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.
The real unemployment rate, or what we call the U-6 rate, is 14.3 percent for June of 2013, which is an increase of one-half percentage point over the previous month. That is the total percentage of unemployed and underemployed workers, making the real number of unemployed Americans in this country 22.6 million people. These are people who are unemployed, want work but have stopped searching for a job, or are working part time simply because they can't find full-time employment.
I would add that when policies coming out of Washington, exemplified by the ObamaCare mandates, are imposed on the American economy, it makes it harder for job creators and employers in this country to create the jobs necessary to affect these numbers in a positive way, to get Americans back to work, and back to work in a full-time way and back to work in a way where they are actually increasing their take-home pay rather than having it decreased by higher costs for everything they have to spend their income on, including the cost of health insurance coverage.
We have been saying for a long time and there is study after study that comes out that talks about how the health care law is going to cause health insurance premiums to rise, and there have been a lot of people who have gotten up here in the Senate, others in the administration, in an attempt to defend the ObamaCare law who have said: Oh, no, no, no, that is not going to be the case; it is actually going to drive premiums down. We continue to hear that, but more and more evidence comes in, and not just studies being done out there but real-life examples of the impact this law is having on insurance premiums.
In fact, there are some actuarial studies that have estimated premiums in various States around the country and what the impact on premiums would be. For the State of Colorado, in the individual market, the estimate by the actuaries is that the insurance premium rates are going to go up by 19 percent; the State of Indiana by 95 percent in the individual market, by 10 percent in the small group market; the State of Maine, the estimates are the individual market premiums are going to go up by 40 percent, 9 percent in the small group market; the State of Minnesota, in the individual market, a 42-percent increase in premiums and 20 percent in the small group market; the State of Wisconsin, a 30-percent increase in the individual market. In the State of Ohio, last month the Department of Insurance announced the average individual market health insurance premium in 2014 will cost 88 percent more. According to Ohio insurance regulators, the department's initial analysis of the proposed rate shows consumers will have fewer choices and pay much higher premiums for their health insurance starting in the year 2014.
Well, it shouldn't be any big surprise when we look at the requirements in the new health care law. The new health care law says you have to have a certain kind of coverage. You can't continue to offer coverage available to people who might want to have different choices about what types of things they want covered, what they want their copays or their deductibles to be. Basically, the law says if you are going to offer a plan, you have to offer this plan, it is a government-approved plan, and it has to have these sorts of coverages and these sorts of things and these bells and whistles.
The new law also says you can get insurance after you get sick. It is called the guarantee issue. No longer is there any requirement to go out and get insurance to protect yourself and prevent yourself from having to be in that situation when illness strikes. Now, if you get sick, you can go out and buy insurance.
It also requires community rating, which changes the way in which health care costs are distributed across the range of people who are covered by health care premiums in this country, making it more expensive for younger people to get their health insurance coverage. That is why we are seeing these steep increases in the individual market.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to continue for a couple of minutes.
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Mr. THUNE. So when we look at all the mandates, the new requirements in the legislation, the new taxes in the legislation, and when we look at all the States trying to deal with and cope with this, and all the small businesses--and small businesses, obviously, weighed in heavily, which is why, as I mentioned earlier, the White House said, look, we are listening, we got the message, and so they waived this, they delayed this at least for 1 year for the small businesses under the employer mandate--all we are simply saying is: Look, there are lots of problems associated with this law. This was a bad law. It is based upon broken promises. It promised lower premiums; we are seeing higher premiums. It includes higher taxes. We are going to see effects all across the economy when it comes to jobs as people cut back and start forcing people into part-time jobs so they are not hit with the employer mandates under this legislation.
So the law affects jobs and it affects the economy. We have a sluggish economic growth rate that has now been adjusted down to 1.8 percent in the last quarter, and we continue to sort of muddle along. One of the reasons for that is because we here in Washington, DC, continue to pile more and more costs on employers trying to do business. So until we understand that to create jobs and grow the economy we have to make it less difficult and less expensive for employers and job creators to create jobs, we will continue to see this trend in the future.
I would simply say to my colleagues here in the Senate, and to the administration, if we are going to delay implementation of the employer mandate for a year, let's delay the individual mandate as well, and let's not just do it for a year, let's permanently delay this. Let's start over and do this the right way, in a way that actually reduces premiums and health care costs for people in this country, that makes it less expensive and less difficult for small businesses to create jobs and grow the economy, and to get Americans back to work in good jobs that pay well, that increase the take-home pay so they can provide in a better way for their families.
Madam President, with that, I yield the floor.
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