Affordable Care Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, the Affordable Care Act is working. It is
working better, frankly, than many of us who were there at its
inception believed it would at this early stage in its implementation.
The numbers are pretty hard to argue with. You have got now upwards of
10 million people who are on either private insurance with tax credits
to help them get that coverage, or are on Medicaid through different
State plans.

That is a big deal, because in just about 1 year, we have reduced the
number of people without insurance by 25 percent in this country. In my
State of Connecticut, which probably has the best-run exchange in the
country, we have actually reduced the number of people without
insurance by 50 percent.

Better news is the quality is getting better. Some of the
measurements we most closely watch to decide whether people are getting
better care--things such as hospital-acquired infections and
readmission rates after surgery--are going down. That is really good
news. Of course, maybe the best news of all is the taxpayers are saving
money, an extraordinary leveling off of health care inflation.

Health care spending never goes down from year to year. We used to
have 7-percent to 8-percent increases in spending on an annual basis.
We are now seeing 2-percent or 3-percent increases. In fact, the lowest
rate of increase since we started tracking health care spending
happened in this last year. Federal taxpayers are saving, on average,
$1,000 per Medicare beneficiary compared to what the Congressional
Budget Office thought we would be spending when we passed the
Affordable Care Act.

That does not mean we do not have a lot of work to do. But it does
mean the conversation we should be having today is about perfecting the
Affordable Care Act, making it work even better, not repealing the
Affordable Care Act.

It is not just me. I have been down to the floor over and over again
to make this case, that the numbers simply do not lie. The press,
universally, perhaps, reporting on this overwhelming avalanche of data,
tells us that the Affordable Care Act is working. I literally in the 5
minutes before I came to the floor did a quick search to see what
people were saying. New York magazine: ``Four new studies. ObamaCare is
working incredibly well.''

Forbes: ``More solid proof that ObamaCare is working.''

Washington Post: ``Despite the critics, ObamaCare works.''

Business Insider: ``Major new study says ObamaCare is working.''

Rolling Stone: ``ObamaCare: It's working.''

I could do a full 10 minutes just on the headlines that tell you the
Affordable Care Act is working. But instead of talking about making it
work better, today we are talking again about repealing it. The House
took, I think, their 56th vote to repeal all or part of the bill. This
morning several of our colleagues unveiled a proposal to replace the
Affordable Care Act.

Now I give my colleagues credit. It has been 5 years. This is the
first time we have seen even a memo on what would be this replacement
we have been hearing a lot about. But it is still a memo, as far as I
can tell. We do not have any legislative text or any CBO score. But I
wanted to come to the floor and talk for a minute about what this
replacement would mean.

The replacement memo we looked at this morning, offered by two of our
Senate colleagues and one of our House colleagues, all really
thoughtful legislators on this issue--I want to give them credit for
putting this on the table. It would really mean the retraction of
health care coverage for millions of Americans. People who have finally
been able to afford health care because of the Affordable Care Act now
would go back onto the rolls of the uninsured.

Why? Well, for two major reasons. Their plan reduces the number of
people who would be eligible for the subsidies by millions, and then
greatly reduces the amount of the subsidy. They admit that is the best
way to get coverage, so we are not arguing any longer, at least, over
whether providing tax credits in order for people to buy private
insurance is the right way to go about expanding coverage. They want to
lessen the amount of money we are providing in tax credits, meaning a
lot less people are going to get insured. So you would have millions
and millions of people who would go back onto the rolls of the
uninsured, people who would once again be at the mercy of insurance
companies, would lose everything, their house, their savings, their
car, just because their kid got sick.

But the second thing it does is really puts insurance companies back
in charge of our health care. It gets rid of the prohibition on gender
rating, which is a complicated way of saying that in the old system,
insurance companies charged women more just because they were women.
The Affordable Care Act does not allow that any longer. But that is
what we would go back to under this alternative. It used to be that
insurance companies would say: You are only going to get a certain
amount of insurance per year and then we cut you off. Well, for a
family I know in Simsbury, CT, whose son has a fairly rare blood
disorder, that meant they had to pull out of their savings every year
in order to afford his expensive drugs. That discriminatory treatment
would come back.

While the bill tries to address the issue of preexisting conditions,
it seems to say that you would have a one-time chance to get on an
affordable care policy if you had a preexisting condition. But if you
did not sign up in that opening moment, in that special offer, then you
would not be able to sign up later on. So if you got sick later on, it
would be too late for you, or if you lost your coverage at any point,
like, on average, 89 million Americans have over the last 3 years, you
would not get the chance to have insurance with a preexisting condition
at the same rate as people without preexisting conditions.

What this bill is about is people paying more and getting less. It is
about going back to the day when people could not afford health care
and they lost everything simply because they or a loved one, a spouse
or a child, got sick. Never mind the fact that some of the pieces I
thought we all agreed on are repealed in this proposal. The doughnut
hole is an outrage, the idea that seniors who are trying to buy
prescription drugs on Medicare get a little bit of coverage, then no
coverage, then a lot of coverage. Middle-income seniors cannot afford
that gap in coverage.

Well, the Affordable Care Act effectively eliminates the doughnut
hole. That has saved seniors $11 billion since 2010. This memo we have
seen from the Republican side would apparently get rid of those
savings, putting the doughnut hole back, putting millions of seniors
back on the hook for all of these costs when they lose coverage. This
effort to replace the Affordable Care Act is a giant step backwards for
millions of American families.

Here is the conversation we should be having: We should be talking
about how to make this law work even better. It is a major concession,
frankly, from the Republicans that tax credits are the appropriate way
to get people more insurance. It is a concession that we should be at
least addressing the issue of discrimination against sick people. But
the protection they are offering is minimal, and the expense that would
be passed on to seniors, families, hard-working Americans is immense.

So I am looking forward to seeing this introduced as a piece of
legislation. I am looking forward to seeing the CBO score on it.
Clearly the American people do not want us to have this debate over
repeal any longer. They are sick and tired of it. They want us to be
talking about creating jobs, protecting this country, making college
more affordable, and making small, meaningful changes to the Affordable
Care Act to make it work even better.

The data does not lie. The numbers do not lie. The increasing stories
of people all across this country who are benefitting from the
Affordable Care Act do not lie. The Affordable Care Act is working. We
should stop having this tired debate over repealing it and replacing it
with something that is much lesser coverage for much more cost and
invest in a conversation about how to make sure the good news continues
about the Affordable Care Act working for millions of Americans.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source