Health Care

Floor Speech

Mr. McCONNELL. Yesterday President Obama was asked about the administration's latest ObamaCare delay. Instead of finally explaining to the American people why he believes certain employers would get ObamaCare exemptions while the middle class should not, he just doubled down again on the same old talking points. It is truly disappointing.

I wish he would finally agree to work with Republicans on a way to replace ObamaCare with bipartisan reforms that could help the middle class and those who are hurting the most because this much is now perfectly clear: ObamaCare is not working the way the administration promised. It is hurting the middle class, it is eliminating incentives to work in the middle of a jobs crisis, and it will lower overall compensation--things such as salaries, wages, and benefits for the American people--with those who earn the least potentially the most negatively impacted of all.

ObamaCare is a law that is not fair, and this is essentially true for many of those it purports to help. For all the disruption and pain, it is a law that will still leave 31 million Americans uninsured at the end of the day. That is why it is not surprising when we hear that nearly 90 percent--9 out of 10--of the new enrollees in ObamaCare exchange plans are actually folks who were already insured, many of them simply shifting from plans they liked to more expensive plans the government thinks they should have. This leads so many Americans to ask: What was the point? What was the point of ObamaCare?

For months the folks in my State have watched the administration hand out exemption after exemption to its friends and waiver after waiver to the politically connected. They are left to think, how is that fair? More than one-quarter of a million Kentuckians received notice last year that their health insurance plans would be canceled because of ObamaCare. Kentuckians lost plans they liked and wanted to keep. Many realized that they wouldn't be able to afford new coverage or that new plans wouldn't cover the doctors and hospitals they have come to know and trust or that massively increased premiums and deductibles would radically alter the ways they lived and worked.

So while I am sure the folks who conceived the law meant well, this much seems perfectly clear by now: Trying to run folks' lives from hundreds of miles away is not the way to help. It is often the way to make things worse.

Kentuckians are capable of making the decisions that worked best for them, for their own medical needs and financial situations. I am sure there is some think-tank report that might disagree. I know there is no end to well-paid Washington bureaucrats with ``better ideas,'' but people do not want Washington's enlightened judgment ruling over their lies.

ObamaCare is what you get when you put decisions that belong in the hands of the middle class in the hands of the government class. You get 2,700 pages of law that lead to 20,000 pages of rules and regulations. You get a Web site that doesn't work as a symbol of a law that won't work. You get a maze of bureaucracies and government contractors with indecipherable acronyms--CMS, CCIIO, CGI, QSSI--that seem to exist to obscure accountability when things go wrong. You get decisions that are based upon the needs of a political calendar rather than what it will take to get the job done.

Worst of all, we hear stories from Kentuckians such as this one from a woman who was about to lose her plan and was shopping on the exchange. She said:

I can't afford the options that have been made available to me. I make too much money to qualify for any ``help'' from the ACA but I don't make enough to afford paying double what my premium is now. To get a plan that is ``comparable'' to what I have now, I will have to pay about $12,000 a year in premiums alone.

You hear stories like the one Rebecca Stuart recently shared with President Obama himself. She told the President that she had to change health insurance plans even though she liked her old plan--and that she was having ``a panicked experience'' trying to get consistent answers about whether her 10-year-old son would continue being able to see his specialist under ObamaCare.

This isn't right. I know the President can't be unmoved by these stories, so I am calling on President Obama to move to the center. I am saying it is time to start over on health care--to replace ObamaCare with real bipartisan reforms that can actually help the people who need it, because a plan such as ObamaCare that costs this much, that hurts this many Americans, and that still fails to achieve its principal goal at the end of the day just won't work.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Pennsylvania.

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