Collapse of American Health Care

Floor Speech

Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, over the past few weeks, it has become obvious that we are watching nothing less than the collapse of the American health care system. Millions of Americans are losing their health plans and set adrift into a dysfunctional system where they cannot find comparable affordable policies.

Few are signing up on the ObamaCare exchanges. How few, we don't know. Because the numbers are so embarrassing, the administration refuses to report them. There are published reports that some 80 percent of the signups are pushed into the Medicaid system, which is itself nearing functional collapse as doctors simply opt out. Those who are able to keep their health plans are seeing their rates skyrocket to unaffordable extremes. Those few who can find affordable policies often discover they are losing their doctors.

Many employers are dropping their employee health plans or reducing salaries or cutting back on work hours or laying off workers while trying to cope with increased costs. A constituent of mine reports her employer cut her salary 23 percent as it tries to cope with ObamaCare costs.

The ObamaCare Web site is a monument to governmental incompetence. This is a Web site designed to sell a single product that has been under development for more than 3 years at a taxpayer cost of more than $600 million--more than was spent developing Facebook or Twitter--and it does not work.

But that is not the big problem.

The big problem is that, today, there are fewer people with health insurance--apparently, a lot fewer than before this program began less than 1 month ago. This is the disaster that Republicans tried to prevent or at least to delay, but that disaster is now unfolding before our eyes with dire consequences for millions of Americans.

With all its flaws, the American health care system was the finest in the world. It was the most innovative, the most advanced, the most adaptable, and the most responsive to the individual needs of patients, and now we are losing it.

The one question I keep hearing is: Well, what do the Republicans propose?

In fact, Republicans have had a comprehensive alternative for years. Spearheaded by Dr. Tom Price of Georgia and Dr. Phil Roe of Tennessee and sponsored by the Republican Study Committee, this package would bring within the reach of all Americans health plans that they could choose according to their own individual needs of their own families, that they could own and that they could control, but this package has never passed the House, and it is high time that it did.

It extends the same tax breaks we currently give to companies to employees so they can afford to buy their own health care, again, according to their own needs.

It expands Health Savings Accounts so people can meet their needs with pretax income.

It restores to people the freedom to shop across State lines to find the best policies to suit their needs.

It restores flexibility so that health plans can accommodate people with preexisting conditions while expanding risk pools to provide for those conditions.

It attacks cost drivers like medical liability law that are making health care unaffordable.

It restores pricing flexibility to plans so that a healthy young person can again purchase catastrophic insurance for next to nothing.

It takes the best of the American health care system, preserves it, and corrects its flaws.

Now, I realize the Senate is likely to bury this reform as it has so many, but it is important that the House pass it so the American people can see that there is still hope to save what was once the finest health care system in the world and that it can be again as soon as this fever dream of ObamaCare finally breaks.

We have just been through a government shutdown because Democrats refused to even consider delaying the ObamaCare train wreck. They got their way, and that train wreck is now upon us. I believe, in coming months, the American people will recognize the urgent warnings that the Republicans tried so desperately to convey, and they will be looking for a way out. We need to blaze that trail now.

For that reason, I ask the House leadership to bring the Republican health care reforms to the floor, to get them to the Senate, and then let the American people decide.

Mr. Speaker, freedom works. It is time we put it back to work.

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