Executive Session - Obamacare
Floor Speech
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Mr. WICKER. Mr. President, the distinguished Senator from Iowa talks convincingly and persuasively about so many times when Members are shut out of the process. Certainly chief among those would have been in 2009, when we could have used the expertise of Senator Grassley, had our colleagues across the aisle been willing to work with him in a bipartisan fashion to write a bipartisan health care bill which employed market principles and competition. Instead, just as he mentioned in his remarks, he was shut out of the process, as were all Republicans. So we have an ObamaCare law on the books now supported by every Democrat in the Senate and supported by no Republicans, some 18 percent of our gross domestic product turned on its head by this legislation, and it was not done in a bipartisan fashion as anything this big should be done. The Senator is correct, and I appreciate him mentioning the larger sense in which Members feel they are being shut out of the process.
I rise tonight particularly to call Members' attention to an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal, Monday, February 24, page A-15, entitled ``ObamaCare and My Mother's Cancer Medicine,'' by Stephen Blackwood.
I have no idea about Stephen Blackwood's politics. The article at the end says Mr. Blackwood is president of Ralston College, a planned liberal arts institution in Savannah, GA. So I know he comes from academia, and I know he loves his mother and is concerned with what ObamaCare has done to his mother's cancer coverage.
The story Mr. Blackwood tells about his mother Catherine reflects the very real life-or-death consequences of the President's health care law. Many of us who oppose the law often point to the financial costs, the delays, and the flawed implementation. But the human aspect is much more tragic.
In relaying his family's current situation in this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, Mr. Blackwood depicts the law's devastating effects on individual Americans. He begins by saying:
When my mother was diagnosed with carcinoid cancer in 2005, when she was 49, it came as a lightning shock.
I know it would to any family. He goes on to say later:
Anyone who's been there knows that a cancer diagnosis is terrifying.
He explains later on in the op-ed that:
Carcinoid, a form of neuroendocrine cancer, is a terminal disease but generally responds well to treatment by Sandostatin, a drug that slows tumor growth and reduces (but does not eliminate) the symptoms of fatigue, nausea, and gastrointestinal dysfunction. My mother received a painful shot twice a month and often couldn't sit comfortably for days afterwards.
As with most cancers, one thing led to another. There have been several more surgeries, metastases, bone deterioration, a terrible bout of thyroiditis (an inflammation of the thyroid gland) and much more. But my mother kept fighting, determined to make the most of life, no matter what it brings. She has indomitable will and is by far the toughest person I've ever met. But she wouldn't be here without the semimonthly Sandostatin shot that slows the onslaught of her disease.
And then in November, along with millions of other Americans, she lost her health insurance. She'd had a Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan for nearly 20 years. It was expensive, but given that it covered her very expensive treatment, it was a terrific plan. It gave her access to any specialist or surgeon, and to the Sandostatin and other medications that were keeping her alive.
And then, because our lawmakers and the president thought they could do better, she had nothing. Her old plan, now considered illegal under the new health law, had been canceled.
Because the exchange website in her state (Virginia) was not working, she went directly to insurers' websites and telephoned them, one by one--
This is a woman with carcinoid cancer whose policy has been cancelled because of ObamaCare
--over dozens of hours. As a medical office manager, she had decades of experience navigating the enormous problems of even our pre-ObamaCare system.
Even with her experience, she had trouble with the repeated and prolonged phone waits, which Mr. Blackwood described as Sisyphean.
In the end, she was told she could purchase a Humana policy.
The enrollment agent said that after she met her deductible for all her treatments and medications, including those for cancer, she would be covered 100 percent. However, the enrollment agents did not have access to the coverage formularies for the plans they were selling. They said the only way to find out what was in the plan in detail was to buy the plan.
Does that sound familiar? It sounds like what the former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, famously told us in 2009. We have to hurry up and pass the bill so we can find out what is in it.
In this case, Mrs. Blackwood needed to hurry up and buy the insurance plan--pay the premiums--so she could then find out whether she was covered, and it turns out she was not covered. The cost of the Sandostatin alone, since January 1 of this year, was $14,000, and the company was refusing pay.
To quote Mr. Blackwood further:
The news was dumbfounding. This was a woman who had an affordable health plan that covered her condition. Our lawmakers weren't happy with that because ..... they wanted plans that were affordable and covered her condition. So they gave her a new one. It doesn't cover her condition and it's completely unaffordable.
Though I'm no expert on ObamaCare (at 10,000 pages, who could be?), I understand that the intention--or at least the rhetorical justification--of this legislation was to provide coverage for those who didn't have it. But there is something deeply and incontestably perverse about a law that so distorts and undermines the free activity of individuals that they can no longer buy and sell the goods and services that keep them alive. ObamaCare made my mother's old plan illegal, and it forced her to buy a new plan that would accelerate her disease and death. She awaits an appeal from her insurer.
Will this injustice be remedied, for her or millions of others? Or is my mother to die because she can no longer afford the treatment that keeps her alive?
Like every American, I want affordable health care, and I'm open to innovative solutions of all kinds--individual, corporate, for-profit, nonprofit and public. It will take all of these, and all the intelligence, creativity and self-discipline we have, as well as everything we can offer one another as families, neighbors, friends and citizens--and it still won't be perfect. But it is precisely because health care for 300 million people is so complicated that it cannot be centrally managed.
Mr. Blackwood concludes:
The ``Affordable'' Care Act is a brutal, Procrustean disaster. In principle, it violates the irreducible particularity of human life, and in practice it will cause many individuals to suffer and die. We can do better, and we must.
At this point, I ask unanimous consent that this opinion piece by Stephen Blackwood be printed in the Record.
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Mr. WICKER. We talk a lot about the failures of the Affordable Care Act. Because of ObamaCare, 7 million people are expected to lose their employer-sponsored health insurance by 2024. Another 5 million Americans have seen their health care plans canceled, and one of them is Mrs. Blackwood.
I say again to my colleagues and everyone within the sound of my voice, I don't know the politics of the Blackwood family. They had an insurance policy that worked for Mrs. Blackwood. It covered a vital drug--Sandostatin--that kept her alive from the disease of carcinoid cancer, and she has lost that coverage because of the very act that was supposed to help people.
Mr. Blackwood says, ``We can do better,'' and I suggest we can do better. We need to repeal this ill-considered law which has caused so much pain for millions and millions of Americans and still left 31 million people uninsured.
We need to work together across the aisle in a bipartisan way to fix this system and have a system that doesn't throw innocent and sick people out of their insurance coverage and threaten their health and their very lives.
I yield the floor.
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