Restoring Americans' Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Madam President, nearly 6 years ago this body was on the verge of passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Today the Senate is poised to repeal that insultingly misnamed law.

Back in the winter of 2009, of course, we still had yet to pass the bill to see what was in it, although one didn't need a Ph.D. in economics to foresee that the Affordable Care Act would be a mess. It wasn't just conservatives and Republicans raising concerns; every sensible observer saw the obvious flaws and the inevitable disasters embedded in the rickety, ideological scheme congressional Democrats were foisting on the American people in an exercise of unprecedented partisanship.

Six years later, the Democratic Party's dream of ObamaCare has become the American people's nightmare. For the past 5 years, the American people have lived with and have suffered through the chaos and dysfunction wrought by ObamaCare's assault on American health care. At every step along the way, opposition to the law has grown stronger and calls for its repeal by the American people have grown louder, which brings us here today.

Last year Republicans running for Congress promised to repeal ObamaCare as a first step toward replacing it with real health care and real insurance reform. It was largely on the basis of this pledge that the American people elected to put the GOP in charge of both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. The bill we are scheduled to vote on later this week brings us as close to fulfilling that promise as is possible under the Senate rules, pursuant to the instructions from the budget resolution that Congress passed just a few months ago.

I applaud the majority leader for his steadfast leadership over the past several days and weeks, and I commend the Senate Budget Committee for its tireless efforts, as Republicans have worked together to craft a reconciliation package that doesn't just tinker around the edges of ObamaCare but lays the groundwork for ObamaCare to be erased from the books altogether. This is the only responsible step for Congress to take because by the law's own standards, according to the promises of the ideologues who imposed it on an unwilling country, ObamaCare has been a failure.

As its name suggests, the overriding objective and promise of the Affordable Care Act was to make health care more affordable for Americans. Yet, nearly 5 years after its passage, no one seriously claims the law has made it easier or more affordable for the American people to access the health care services they need. Facts are not optional, and the facts prove that quality, affordable health care is harder to find in America today than it was 6 years ago, especially for low- and middle-income Americans.

With so much political and ideological capital invested in propping up and defending ObamaCare, President Obama and his allies here in Congress are forced to simply try to skirt the facts. Take, for instance, the left's favorite half-truth--the notion that ObamaCare has succeeded because there are fewer uninsured Americans today than before the Affordable Care Act was signed in the law. But the other salient fact routinely omitted by the President and congressional Democrats is that the vast majority of the newly insured receive their coverage through Medicaid. The reason ObamaCare supporters have made a habit of ignoring this fact is obvious: For 50 years, Medicaid has served as the preeminent case study of how not to run a health insurance program. Medicaid's abysmal track record of failing our most vulnerable populations will only get worse as millions of new, able-bodied adults join the program.

Then there is the fact that in 2016, insurance premiums are set to continue their steep assent toward unaffordability.

That goes for insurance plans on the ObamaCare exchanges as well as commercial plans purchased in the private market.

ObamaCare supporters have long promised that rising premiums would be at worst a brief detour on the centrally planned road to affordable health care, but as it turns out the iron laws of economics have once again triumphed over ideological wishful thinking. According to a survey of commercial insurance brokers conducted by Morgan Stanley, the average rate hike in 2016 for individual insurance plans will be 12.6 percent--slightly higher than the 11.2-percent increase last year--and the increase in small group rates will be 13.5 percent, up from a hike of 11.7 percent last year. So this creep continues. It keeps getting worse for the American people.

The outlook for insurance plans on the ObamaCare exchanges is just as bleak. Last month the Department of Health and Human Services announced that insurance premiums will rise an additional 7.5 percent next year in the 37 States using the notoriously defective and flawed healthcare.gov, and that is just the average, which obscures the more dramatic premium increases for residents in several States in particular, such as Oklahoma and Alaska, both of which are projected to see their ObamaCare premiums spike more than 30 percent next year.

Compounding the continued acceleration of premium hikes is the simultaneous increase in deductibles and the narrowing of choices that patients face in the health care market. In my home State of Utah, for instance, the residents of 20 out of my State's 29 counties are limited to only one health insurance plan option.

This toxic combination of rising health care costs and limited health care choices has already had serious consequences, especially for low- and middle-income Americans who are most severely affected by the law and who are the least capable of dealing with adverse consequences. According to a recent Gallup poll, nearly one in three Americans report that they or a family member have postponed or delayed medical treatment within the past year because of the cost, and they are more likely to have done so for a serious medical condition than for a medical condition deemed nonserious.

What is even more remarkable is that the proportion of Americans who delay medical treatment because of the cost has remained basically unchanged for the last decade, even as the number of Americans with insurance coverage has increased. It is not just patients who have found ObamaCare to be too expensive. Insurance providers are coming to the same conclusion. To date, half of the 23 cooperatives created by ObamaCare collapsed despite receiving billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies. The shuttering of the once-celebrated ObamaCare co-ops is not just a sign of the law's unsustainability, it is also a major source of the stress and anxiety that millions of Americans are experiencing as a result of this unfortunate law.

Just ask the hundreds of thousands of Utahans who recently found out that Arches Health Plan, a co-op that served roughly one-quarter of the State's exchange enrollees could not afford to stay in business next year. The announcement came only 5 days before open enrollment began this fall, leaving families across Utah scrambling to find a new plan and hoping they can afford it--like so many before them, the collateral damage of the President's repeated broken promise that if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.

Then there was the recent warning from United Healthcare. United is the Nation's largest health insurance provider. It was supposed to be big enough and with enough efficiencies built into its operations to absorb the new costs associated with doing business within the ObamaCare regulatory framework. Yet just a few weeks ago, United announced that the financial realities of its ObamaCare plans may soon force the insurance giant to stop offering insurance plans through the public exchanges.

The Affordable Care Act has been described by some of its supporters as a train wreck. It certainly looks that way as we watch hard truths and economic realities unravel the coalition of insurers that were once great champions of ObamaCare, but when you think about it, the term ``train wreck'' isn't quite the right metaphor to describe the calamity that is the Affordable Care Act. It misses the crucial point. Train wrecks are accidents, aberrations, anomalies. The failures of ObamaCare were no such thing. They were entirely predictable. We knew they were coming, despite the President's repeated assurances to the contrary.

There was nothing unexpected about the collapse of a national health care pseudo market, governed by a perverse set of incentives and exemptions that encouraged young and healthy individuals to stay out of the health insurance market. Now, nearly 5 years after its passage, there is no denying the manifest failures of ObamaCare. The only question left is, What are we going to do about it?

For the Democratic Party, the answer is--as we have come to expect--more of the same. Shield the ramshackle architecture and bloated bureaucracy of ObamaCare from any meaningful reform, and whenever possible double down--more ill-conceived and costly regulations, more Federal micromanagement of the health decisions of individuals, families, doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies, more price controls, all peddled using the same hackneyed promises and proclamations of compassion and fairness that have nearly drowned out any honest discourse during the past 6 years regarding health care.

ObamaCare has given the American people a preview of this approach to health care policy, and they have emphatically rejected it, which is why the Senate will soon vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but just saying no is not by itself enough.

Conservatives and Republicans must also offer the country a health care reform agenda to be for, something they can support affirmatively, proactively. Already there are a number of conservative leaders in Congress who have developed reform plans that would replace ObamaCare's cumbersome, bureaucratic, and expensive health care system with one that is flexible, decentralized, and affordable. We must build on these plans and advance legislation that empowers patients and families--not distant, coercive, powerful bureaucracies--to decide how they want to spend their health care dollars, and that encourages innovation and investment across all health care sectors. Repealing the Affordable Care Act is the first step in that process--the beginning, not the end of our road to building a market-based, patient-centered health care system in America.

I look forward to joining my colleagues in voting to repeal ObamaCare and entering this new phase of health care reform. I thank my colleagues who cooperated and worked together in developing this bill that I wholeheartedly support.

Thank you, Madam President.

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