Obamacare
Floor Speech
Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk about a new CNN poll that came out yesterday. It says support for the President's health care law appears to be ``waning.'' CNN polling director Keating Holland talks about this. He says that support has dropped in virtually all demographic categories, but it has fallen the farthest among two core Democratic groups: women and Americans who make less than $50,000 a year.
He goes on to say:
Those are also the two groups that are most likely to pay attention to health insurance issues and possibly the ones most likely to be affected by any changes. That may be particularly true for lower-income Americans who are most likely to have part-time jobs, be on Medicaid, or not currently have health insurance and thus be the first to have to navigate the new system.
So there is the story from CNN polling yesterday: Support for the President's health care law appears to be waning.
I have spent a lot of time, as the Presiding Officer has, over the last month traveling around my State, listening to constituents, hearing what is on people's minds. That is what I did back in Wyoming over the last month. I do it every weekend, meet with lots of people. We have had lots of county fairs and rodeos, townhall gatherings.
One thing that came up just about everywhere I went was the concern that so many folks still have about the President's health care law. Some are confused, many are upset, and many more are angry, angry that the law is doing serious damage to middle-class jobs and to people's paychecks. Even the insurance coverage many people already had and liked, there are things they are going to lose.
Republicans have warned from the beginning that the President's law created too much redtape, too many new taxes, new fees, and expensive mandates. As a result, people are going to end up paying a lot for health insurance.
Well, for months now, Americans have been seeing exactly that. One of the latest numbers that really stuck out was from Delta Air Lines. They say they are going to be paying about $100 million more to cover their employees next year. All of the mandates in the health care law, the President has said so many of these are free. They are not free. Somebody has got to pay for them. Just covering workers' children up until age 26--it is about 8,000 young people covered by Delta Air Lines, added to their policy--is going to cost them an extra $14 million next year.
Remember, the President said health care costs were supposed to go down, not up. He also said that for 85 to 90 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, the only impact, he said, of the law was that their insurance was better than it has ever been before.
Well, that does not seem to be the case. All you need to do is pull out today's New York Times business section, first page, B-1, above the fold, ``Unions' Misgivings on Health Law Burst Into View.'' Labor delegates level criticism at Congress and the President. It seems the President's promises to people who believed him that they could keep what they had if they like it--they are now saying: Mr. President, something has to change here. You know, you have not leveled with us. What we are seeing now coming out of this administration is not what you promised us.
It is not just the New York Times. Today's Investors Business Daily, above the fold, first page, ``ObamaCare Hitting Union Members--And They're Upset.'' Unionized part-timers losing health insurance; full-timers losing hours. That is not what the President promised.
What this means is people are not just losing their health care, their insurance, it is affecting their jobs and it is affecting their paychecks.
Another step some employers have had to take is to drop coverage for spouses who can get their insurance elsewhere. The President said that was not going to happen. He said, if you like the insurance you have, you will be able to keep it. But once again the President has failed to see how much harm his health care law will do to middle-class Americans. Those hard-working people are now paying the price. In a recent memo to employees, the shipping company UPS said it plans to exclude 15,000 spouses from its insurance plan. They cited the health care law as the top reason for the switch.
It is not just businesses. The University of Virginia recently announced plans to drop spousal coverage for some of its employees too. The President is berating colleges about the cost of tuition, but yet his own mandates are making it more expensive for colleges to provide insurance for members of their faculty. So, of course, they pass those costs on to the students. The school said the President's health care law would add $7.3 million to the cost of its health plan in 2014. So just like UPS, if a worker's husband or wife can get insurance from their own employer, the University of Virginia will not be covering them anymore, even if it is insurance that they have and they like, the President said they could keep. The school directly laid some of the blame on the health care law. It is not something the President admitted might happen, and it is not something he is eager to talk about now.
He is also not eager to talk about his promise to cut the price people pay for insurance. President Obama promised that by the end of his first term he would lower people's premiums by $2,500 per family per year. He did not say this once; he said it over and over, at least 19 times. He did not misspeak. It was a practiced line, an intentional line, an intentional part of his stump speech.
He did not say premiums would go down if Congress passes a perfect law that takes effect the first day in office. He did not tell the audience it would be $2,500 less than the projected rate of growth someone estimated we would have otherwise. He chose to ignore all of that, to leave out every caveat he could have included. He said, $2,500 less by the end of his first term, period.
Every person, every audience, knew what the President was promising. Well, now we know President Obama broke that promise, like so many others. He and his supporters should stop trying to explain it away and admit they failed.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average family premium has soared by almost $3,000 since the President took office. That is not a prediction about what will happen over the next 4 years; it is a simple, indisputable fact about how much more people are already paying. So you have people who are losing their insurance plans that the President's health care law taxes too heavily. You have other people losing the insurance they have now because employers are dropping coverage for spouses. You have some people who will keep their insurance but they are going to have a lot less money in their paycheck because costs are going up, thanks to the health care law. You have a lot of people the President's health care law is really hitting in the wallet. It is because we are continuing to see towns and counties and school districts having to cut back the hours of their workers. They need to keep more employees at a part-time status in order to reduce the burdens and expenses of the health care law. Over the past month, even more places have had to take these steps.
Middletown Township in New Jersey said they would cut the hours of 25 people. A county in Texas said it would do the same. Another county in Florida figured it would cost them more than $1 million to cover all of their part-time workers under the health care law. So they are already reducing the hours for some of these people and they are planning to make additional cuts.
The Obama administration is brushing off these reports. They are saying it is only anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal? These are not anecdotes, these are people's jobs. One of the analysts out there found 258 different employers have cut work hours, cut jobs, or taken other steps to avoid ObamaCare's costs--258 employers across the country, many of them school districts, counties, communities, some private businesses, and more are coming forward every day. They are limiting the hours they can pay busdrivers, librarians, coaches, substitute teachers, and middle-class workers. The Obama administration says, everything is fine because some of these workers will get a subsidy to help buy their expensive insurance.
Well, the people I talk to are not looking for a subsidy, they are looking for a job. They are looking for more hours. They are looking for the ability to take home a paycheck comparable to the paycheck they may have had last year but it is going down because their hours have been cut. They want the Obama administration to stop making it so tough for them to find full-time work. They want to go back to the insurance they had before the President's health care law went into effect. Instead, they are getting more bad news, more signs that the health care law is a trainwreck that is going to hurt the middle class even more.
We all knew the health care system in this country had problems and needed to be fixed. Costs were rising year after year. Too many people were having trouble getting the care they needed. Democrats could have sat down with Republicans to write a law to help those people. Instead, President Obama and Democrats in Congress, who were in charge of the House and the Senate, passed their plan, a one-sided plan, a plan that today is failing the American people. They did it without Republican support, and they did it without seriously considering our ideas.
Washington Democrats promised reform, but the reform they promised is not what is delivered in this 2,800-page health care law. With over 100,000 pages of regulations, it is hard for anyone to understand or comply with.
Republicans have voted to repeal this failed law and start over with reforms that solve the biggest problems families face today. We are going to keep trying to get that done. If Democrats are serious about helping middle-class Americans, they will join us.
I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
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