Health Care

Floor Speech

Mr. McCONNELL. First, a few observations about ObamaCare. It may not have existed in the English language a few years ago, but in short order it has become a battle word for broken promises and almost cartoonish inefficiency. It is no wonder why: You can keep your plan. You can keep your doctor. Premiums will go down. The law will create millions of jobs.

We knew the promises wouldn't hold up. Many of us said so. One even earned the dubious distinction of being declared the ``lie of the year.'' And that is why it is so hard to trust much of what the Obama administration claims about ObamaCare these days, such as back in December when administration officials issued another promise--that they would make sure any taxpayer-funded ObamaCare subsidies would go only to enrollees who actually qualify for them under the law.

We wanted this assurance not only because so many other promises had been broken; we wanted it because eligibility verification is so important. Middle-class taxpayers are feeling enough pain from this law already. They shouldn't have to subsidize inaccurate or even fraudulent ObamaCare claims on top of all the rest. So I helped pass a law that requires a nonpartisan watchdog to keep an eye on the procedures the administration claimed would protect taxpayers to see how they will work and then report back to us in Congress.

Last week that watchdog, the inspector general, issued the first two reports on the issue, and it turns out we were pretty correct to be worried. The inspector general concluded that the administration was often ineffective at verifying such basic details about ObamaCare enrollees as their citizen status, their income, their Social Security number, and whether they were even eligible to purchase ObamaCare in the first place. The administration, the IG reported, didn't even follow its own eligibility verification procedures in many cases.

And that wasn't all. The IG also discovered nearly 3 million inconsistencies in the information ObamaCare enrollees provided in their applications, nearly 90 percent of which couldn't even be resolved because the necessary software--the necessary software--wasn't even operational.

It is completely ridiculous.

And the administration is still struggling to get a handle on the problem. Computer systems that should have been ready to go last October have not been built yet. It is the kind of scenario we would expect to see in a Leslie Nielsen movie, not in real life.

Worse still, administration officials are now indicating they are going to keep chugging ahead with their deeply flawed verification practices, even after everything the government's own watchdog uncovered.

Many individuals enrolled with the current flawed enrollment process will automatically be enrolled for the same taxpayer subsidies next year.

They are defiant--defiant--in the face of all of this. This is precisely the kind of flippant attitude that is so infuriating to many of our constituents.

Many of us predicted these kinds of problems would be the likely outcome of giving government such expansive power over a huge segment of our economy. Of course we are going to have massive inefficiency and probable fraud and migraines for middle-class families who already have enough to deal with. Of course we are going to see all this. It seems inevitable.

That is why Republicans say we need to start over with actual health care reform--reform that can actually lower costs and increase the quality of care without resorting to this tired sort of government-centric approach.

ObamaCare is built upon the intellectually lazy idea that we can simply legislate a desirable outcome into existence, that we can tell a hulking Federal bureaucracy to simply bureaucratize affordable health care into being. Unfortunately, life does not work that way. Reality always intervenes, as we have been seeing with the pain of ObamaCare these past few years--pain that will only continue until Washington Democrats join us to enact a serious bipartisan solution that actually addresses many of our health care challenges and dispenses with the failed policies of this administration. Yet that is exactly the opposite of what we have seen from our friends on the other side so far.

Instead of working with us to solve massive problems, such as the ones the inspector general identified, Democrats in Washington are simply hiding from the issue altogether. They are trying to change the subject. Even hinting at it prompts the Democratic majority to shut down the legislative process altogether and cancel committee markups. They block votes and amendments. They will not allow the Senate to consider numerous bipartisan House-passed bills that would address some of ObamaCare's most glaring problems.

Even when a bipartisan group proposes a plan to address a flaw in the law that is reducing incomes for working families, they reject it. Instead, they schedule show votes designed to inflame one group or another.

As for the President, he is traveling around the country this week to give campaign speeches--not working with Congress to help middle-class families struggling under the weight of his policies. So the Democratic plan seems to be to double down on the mess they created and to hope Americans can be distracted enough to forget about it come November.

If that is the plan, it is not going to work. Middle-class Americans know who has been standing by their side throughout this entire ObamaCare fiasco. They know who has been standing against them, serving as a shield for the President and the hard left.

It is not too late for Democrats in Washington to work with Republicans to address the massive problem they created. If they truly care about the millions they have already hurt in this country with this law, it is time to do just that.

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