Health Care

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to discuss the pain ObamaCare continues to inflict on Americans. It seems like every week brings more ObamaCare bad news for somebody--families, businesses, middle-income Americans, lower income Americans. This past week the bad news was for seniors.

On Friday the Obama administration announced its planned 2015 cuts to Medicare Advantage--cuts that were dictated by ObamaCare and will result in higher prices and fewer choices for millions of American seniors. More than 15 million seniors--close to 30 percent of all Medicare recipients--are enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans. The Wall Street Journal reports that approximately one out of every two new Medicare enrollees chooses Medicare Advantage.

Medicare Advantage offers seniors a chance to pick a plan that is right for them instead of a one-size-fits-all approach. Advantage plans also frequently offer important health supplements, such as dental, vision, hearing, and wellness benefits, as well as smaller copays or deductibles. Studies also show that Medicare Advantage Program enrollees receive better care and experience better health outcomes than seniors enrolled in traditional fee-for-service Medicare.

Despite the benefits these plans offer to seniors, Democrats and the President supported Medicare Advantage cuts in the President's health care law. In 2010, the President and Democrats paid--or I should say tried to pay--for ObamaCare by, among other things, cutting more than $700 billion from Medicare--already, I might add, on its way to bankruptcy--to pay for yet a new entitlement for nonseniors. More than $300 billion of those cuts were targeted specifically at the Medicare Advantage Program.

Those cuts are kicking in this year, hitting Medicare Advantage beneficiaries with cost increases and benefit cuts of up to $70 per month--no small amount for a senior on a fixed income. Friday's announcement of further steep cuts for 2015 could mean up to an additional $75 per month in increased cost next year.

But that is not all. Cost hikes are bad enough, but this year's cuts and the 2015 cuts announced Friday will result in a host of other problems for seniors who participate in Medicare Advantage. First and foremost, some seniors will lose their plans entirely as a result of ObamaCare's cuts, breaking the President's promise that if you like your plan you can keep it.

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that more than one-half million seniors will lose their current plans in 2014. If the 2015 cuts go into effect, even more seniors will lose their plans next year. Seniors will also have fewer plan choices as a result of ObamaCare's raiding Medicare Advantage to pay for a new health care entitlement program. If next year's cuts go into effect, we can expect to see even more reductions.

These higher costs and reductions in available Medicare Advantage plans will disproportionately impact low-income seniors in rural areas, areas such as those I represent in South Dakota. Forty-one percent of those seniors in Medicare Advantage plans have annual incomes of less than $20,000 and are least able to bear the higher costs forced on them by ObamaCare. Yet it is precisely those seniors who are bearing the greatest burden when it comes to paying for ObamaCare.

On top of that, reports indicate that plans are responding to the cuts by reducing their footprint in rural markets, giving these seniors fewer options when it comes to choosing a health care plan.

Finally, similar to so many other Americans suffering under ObamaCare, seniors on a Medicare Advantage plan may no longer be able to keep the doctors they have and like thanks to these cuts. Between Medicare cuts and the new ObamaCare tax insurance companies are facing this year, companies are scrambling for ways to be able to afford to continue their plans. Frequently their only option is to narrow their networks of doctors and hospitals or raise their copayments and deductibles, thus reducing seniors' choices and increasing their health care costs.

Republicans have long touted the quality care and patient choice offered by Medicare Advantage plans. When the health care bill was being considered in 2010, we warned at the time that Medicare cuts being proposed in the bill would hurt seniors, damage Medicare Advantage, and weaken a program already hastening toward bankruptcy. Despite this, Democrats not only supported the health care bill, they also voted twice against measures to repeal the law's cuts to Medicare Advantage.

Now it seems many Democrats have changed their minds. Earlier this month, 19 Democratic Senators, most of whom voted for ObamaCare in 2010, joined a number of Republicans in sending a letter to Marilyn Tavenner, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, urging her not to cut Medicare Advantage. Let's hope it is not too little too late.

Democrats' support for the Medicare Advantage letter to the CMS Administrator reflects their increasing unease with their support for ObamaCare. Once they planned to tout ObamaCare to voters as a legislative triumph, but Democrats up for reelection now can't run away from the law fast enough.

In fact, the President has repeatedly delayed parts of the health care law to give Democrats political cover. Each delay is a tacit admission that, yes, this law will hurt jobs and the economy because, after all, if this law is not going to hurt jobs and the economy, why do we have to continually delay it? The latest number is somewhere in the twenties. I have heard 24, 27, and 28 different delays of the harmful effects and impacts of ObamaCare.

If the health care law is the panacea the American people were promised, Democrats and the President would be working to implement the law faster, not slow it down.

The only possible reason to delay the law is because its implementation is going to hurt. It is a little awkward when your signature legislation has to be repeatedly delayed to give the folks who voted for it a better chance of keeping their jobs.

Unfortunately, the President doesn't seem to have learned his lesson. Not content with the damage his health care law is doing to an already struggling economy--a recent CBO report warned that the health care law may result in up to 2.5 million fewer full-time workers--he continues to push policies that will further weaken an already sluggish economy, such as a minimum wage bill that CBO reports would result in up to 1 million fewer jobs.

At a time when our labor force participation rate is at Jimmy Carter-era lows, a law that would further reduce the number of full-time workers is one of the worst possible things we could do for our economy. People working produces economic growth. The fewer people working, the less likely we are to produce the kind of growth we need to pull our economy out of the slump it has been in throughout the President's administration. What we need right now are policies that will create jobs and encourage businesses to expand and invest in our economy and in our workers.

If the President were really serious about reversing the economic stagnation of the past 5 years, he wouldn't be pushing his health care bill or a minimum wage hike. Instead, he would be calling the Senate majority leader and urging him to take up and pass trade promotion authority, which will create thousands of jobs for American workers. He would sign off on the Keystone Pipeline and the 42,000-plus jobs it would support. He would join bipartisan majorities in both Houses of Congress to support a repeal of the job-destroying medical device tax in his health care law, a tax that has already cost more than 33,000 jobs.

American families and workers are hurting. They have been hit hard by ObamaCare and the Obama economy. It is time for the President to give them some help.

I would argue there are bipartisan issues out there. The trade promotion authority, repealing the medical device tax, and the Keystone Pipeline have broad bipartisan majorities here in the Senate. We had a vote a year ago on the budget on repealing the medical device tax, and 79 Senators, including 30 Democrats, voted for that. The last time we had a vote here on the Keystone Pipeline, 62 voted in support of it, again representing broad bipartisan support for that initiative. We know the trade promotion authority is something that enjoys support from both Republicans and Democrats. All of these initiatives enjoy broad bipartisan support and are known job creators. Those are the types of things we ought to be focused on, not things that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, are going to cost more jobs.

Implementation of ObamaCare, according to the CBO report a couple weeks ago, will reduce the number of workers in this country by 2.5 million over the next decade. It also said it would reduce overall wages by about 1 percent. So that is fewer jobs and lower take-home pay.

Last week we had the report come out from the Congressional Budget Office that raising the minimum wage could cost up to 1 million jobs at the same time it is raising prices. So the very people we are trying to help are going to have fewer jobs and higher costs. How does that solve the problems our economy faces? How does that get people in this country back to work? How does that grow and expand our economy in a way that creates greater opportunity for middle-class families?

There are things we can do on which there is broad bipartisan support that are known job creators, that are known to expand and grow our economy. I would add to that list as well reforming our Tax Code. We have lost so much in terms of economic growth in the past few years since the recession and coming out of that recession because we have had subpar growth. We haven't seen the type of growth rates we normally see and experience coming out of a recession during a recovery. As a consequence, we have much larger deficits because when the economy is growing at a sluggish, anemic, slow rate, it means there are fewer people working, fewer people investing, fewer people making money, and therefore fewer people paying taxes. We need the opposite. We need a growing, expanding, vibrant, dynamic economy fueled by policies in Washington, DC, that make it less expensive and less difficult to create jobs rather than more expensive and more difficult, which is what we see coming out of the Obama administration and the Democratic majority here in the Senate.

We can do better. We must do better for the American people, for middle-class families who have been hit hard by the effects and the impacts of this economy with fewer jobs, lower take-home pay, higher premiums, higher deductibles, and fewer choices of doctors and hospitals under ObamaCare. These policies are hurting the American people. We need to put policies in place that will help the American people by growing our economy and creating more jobs for middle-class Americans.

I yield the floor.

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