Health Care

Floor Speech

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, yesterday I was visited by several hospitals from Chicago. Mount Sinai is an amazing hospital. It originally--you can tell by its name--was founded by Jewish families living in a section of Chicago. The families have moved on. The remaining population is largely African American and Hispanic. It is a very poor neighborhood. It is a violence-ridden neighborhood. But in an amazing show of magnanimity and charity, many of the Jewish families whose ancestors and predecessors predated them and founded this hospital continue to support Mount Sinai. It is a beacon of quality medical care in one of the toughest, meanest neighborhoods in that great city.

They came to speak yesterday, to meet with me. They just merged with another extraordinary hospital, Holy Cross Hospital in Marquette Park. I have a special affection for this hospital because for decades it was run by the Sisters of St. Casimir, a Lithuanian Catholic order of nuns who devoted their lives first to the Lithuanian population that lived in that neighborhood and then, after that population left, to those who came after them, many of them very poor people.

Mount Sinai and Holy Cross merged, and between the two of them, I can't think of better examples of hospitals with a mission to help the poorest people and to make certain they have care that all of us would like to have for our families. They came yesterday to talk to me about the Affordable Care Act.

There are so many speeches on the floor about the Affordable Care Act. Most of them from the other side of the aisle are entirely negative. But there are some things about the Affordable Care Act which were brought to my attention from these two intercity hospitals which I think we should all look at carefully.

First, they are telling me that at these hospitals more people are showing up and paying. In days gone by, many of those who came in for services were charity cases. The cost of their service was passed on to everyone else. Now, under the Affordable Care Act, many of these lower-income families have health insurance for the first time in their lives.

I have met some of these families, and I know what it means to them. It was several years ago when I was approached by the chairman of the Cook County board, Toni Preckwinkle, the president, and we asked for a waiver from the Obama administration to enroll families in Cook County in the Medicaid portion of the Affordable Care Act before it actually went into effect.

We were given that waiver. We now have 100,000 individuals in Cook County--low-income individuals--who have Medicaid protection.

This Medicaid protection has allowed them to have quality health insurance for the first time in their lives, in many cases, and also it means when they present themselves for care in hospitals, they are paying. They are paying through the Medicaid program rather than coming in as charity cases.

What we are finding as well is that as more and more Americans have the option of health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, the percentage of Americans who are uninsured has gone down. The share of adults without health insurance declined to 13.4 percent last month from 15.6 percent just a few months before. It is an indication of more and more people in America having the peace of mind that comes with health insurance coverage.

I see the Senator from Kentucky is here, and I know he reserved the floor this morning, and I don't want to take his time.

I also want to make the point as well that as we are bringing in more cost savings in health care through the Affordable Care Act, we are seeing the overall increase in health care costs starting to decline and slow down. That is what we were shooting for--more and more accessibility in coverage, more affordability for those who have that coverage and the overall cost in health care systems starting to come down. It is an experiment which is starting to show good results.

Let me add that as proud as I am to have supported this law, it is not perfect. There are things we need to do to improve it and to refine it. We should do those on a bipartisan basis. That is what we are waiting for.

The House of Representatives has now voted--I believe the number is 50 times--to repeal the Affordable Care Act. I hope they have gotten it out of their system and now will sit down with us and work on a bipartisan basis to make it a better law. We can do that and we should do it together.

So I commend this effort to both sides of the aisle--in the Senate as well as in the House--and I hope that we can achieve something that will make a difference.

I would like to close by mentioning two of my constituents in Illinois before I turn the floor over to the Senator from Kentucky.

Philosophy Walker is a 28-year-old graduate student in biblical studies at the University of Chicago. Her husband Adam is 31 years old and a part-time youth minister. Philosophy's school provides health insurance, but it is $900 per month for her and her husband. That would require them to take out additional student loans to pay their health insurance while they are in school.

Before moving to Chicago, they were paying $700 per month for health insurance through COBRA, which is an option for those who have lost health insurance--but an expensive one. The $700 payment depleted their savings because her husband struggled to find a full-time job. Going without health insurance wasn't an option because Philosophy Walker has some severe allergy problems.

Last November they signed up through the Affordable Care Act exchange and purchased a plan comparable to the COBRA coverage that had cost them $700 a month, but the plan also included dental insurance, which they never had before.

Philosophy and her husband Adam, under this Affordable Care Act plan, pay $200 a month. It went from $700 to $200. Philosophy also receives her monthly allergy medication for free, rather than the previous $10 monthly copay.

If we listen to some of the stories on the floor of the Senate, you would never believe this story, but it is true.

I wish also to talk about Laurel Tyler, who runs a small business with her husband in Illinois. Because they have two employees and one of the children of one of their employees has asthma, the policies they were sold in the past were extremely expensive.

Because of the Affordable Care Act and the Illinois marketplace, Laurel's business is going to save 20 percent on health care costs, and the 22-year-old son with asthma can stay on the employee's plan. That, to me, is a success story.

Let's build on that success. Let's work together to make this law even stronger.

I yield the floor.

Source