Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2013 - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. I see my colleague from Maryland is here. I promise I will not take all of that time.

During the debate over ObamaCare back in 2009 and 2010, the President repeatedly and unequivocally promised his fellow Americans that if they liked their current health care plan, they could keep it. By one account, there were as many as 29 different times where the President was captured on videotape making that same unequivocal commitment. This was not an off-the-cuff remark or a casual throwaway comment, it was essential to the President's entire argument selling ObamaCare.

I heard the distinguished majority whip from Illinois talking about the reasons why ObamaCare was so important, suggesting that you could not cover preexisting conditions or even young adults up to the age of 26 unless you accepted the whole package, the whole enchilada, as we would say in Texas. Well, that is not true. The truth is we are committed to dealing with preexisting conditions, we are committed to helping people be able to buy and afford health care coverage. What the President sold in 2009 and 2010 was basically sold under false pretenses, as it turns out. If Americans had known that ObamaCare would result in them losing their current coverage which they like, it never would have become law. According to one estimate, as many as 3.5 million people will lose their current health insurance coverage.

I have heard the revisionist history here on the floor and elsewhere. They are trying to change the commitment. Rather than: You can keep your current coverage if you like it, period, which is what I know the President said at the American Medical Association and many other times, now they are trying to tweak that and say: If it is not otherwise changed or canceled by our insurance company.

Well, that is not what the President said then. That is not what the American people heard. That is not the basis upon which ObamaCare was sold to the American people in 2009 and 2010. When President Obama campaigned for reelection in 2012, he reiterated his promise from 2009 and 2010, again a remarkably consistent message from the President. He said: If you liked your existing plan and you wanted to keep it, you had nothing to worry about.

Here is the exact statement the President made on June 28, 2012, at a White House press conference. ``If you are one of the more than 250 million Americans who already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.'' That is a direct quote, no qualifiers, no caveats--a simple unequivocal promise. However, way back in 2010 we now learn that the Obama administration itself issued the very regulations which have made, keeping this promise impossible. Indeed, the 2010 ObamaCare regulations acknowledged that between 40 to 67 percent of all policies in the individual market would lose their grandfathered status by 2014 and must be required to meet the costly mandates in ObamaCare. In other words, at the same time the President was making the promise, his own administration acknowledged that the regulations they were passing would make it impossible to keep it.

Well, as you can imagine, people are increasingly frustrated by these broken promises.

I recently set up a Web site in my office where my constituents can let me know how their personal health care coverage has been affected by the implementation of ObamaCare. I hope if others who perhaps may hear my comments on the floor this morning have stories they would like for us to be able to tell to explain how these broken promises have resulted in their inability to keep what they have, they will let us know on our Web site. It is cornyn.senate.gov. I plan to forward these stories to the President.

One woman from Livingston, TX, over in East Texas, writes:

My health insurance is being canceled due to the Affordable Care Act. My insurance company offered a plan ..... that I can keep until 2014. Guess what? It's 19 percent more a month than my current plan and drops coverage for laboratory and imaging studies.

So not only is it more expensive, it actually reduces the coverage. Going on, she said:

In December 2014, I'll have to change it again. Premiums for myself and my husband at that time will increase 100 percent each, which will equal just about half--50 percent--of our gross monthly income. What exactly are we supposed to do?

Another woman from Pampa, TX, up in the Texas Panhandle, writes that her monthly health insurance premiums have increased by 30 percent already over last year, and now her policy is being canceled altogether because of ObamaCare, so she has to purchase a new health insurance policy that will cost, in her words, ``much more'' than her existing coverage.

As her letter indicates, many of the folks losing their insurance will be forced to buy a new ObamaCare-approved policy from an online exchange which does not even work yet. It is no wonder that a growing number of our friends across the aisle are beginning to wonder: Why did the administration not extend the open enrollment period beyond March 2014? They realize they were marching in lockstep with the President when he made these promises, and the fact that these promises are not being kept is a political liability for them. At the very least it is a hardship for their constituents that they would like to see rectified.

Why is the ObamaCare Web site malfunctioning? It is an important question. But it is again just the tip of the iceberg. Remember, ObamaCare became the law of the land more than 3 1/2 years ago. I think most people are astonished to learn that. Some news reports I have read said that people thought ObamaCare had already been fully implemented, we have been talking about it for so long. But by design, it was created to be implemented over a many-year period of time. I think that was a terrible mistake, because the political accountability that comes with implementing a law and then having to live with the political consequences of not delivering on your promises has now been delayed.

But 3 1/2 years ago the administration should have gotten prepared to roll out its signature legislative achievement. According to CBS News, one of President Obama's top outside health care advisors sent the White House a memo back in May of 2010 warning them that ObamaCare was spiraling out of control. This memo came from Harvard economist David Cutler and reads in part:

I do not believe the relevant members of the Administration understand the President's vision or have the capability to carry it out. ..... You need to have people who have the understanding of the political process, people who understand how to work within an Administration, and people who understand how to start and to build a business, and unfortunately, nationally they just didn't get all of those people together.

Republicans have for years been warning that this government takeover of one-sixth of our economy, this central planning scheme, social engineering, if you will, would not work. At the very least, the Federal Government has proven itself incompetent on making something this big and this complicated and this expensive work as advertised, it is becoming increasingly clear. We spent years warning that ObamaCare would force many Americans to lose their existing coverage. We spent years warning that ObamaCare would limit patient choices and reduce health options. We have spent years warning that the law itself would prove to be unworkable. Now it appears that many of those warnings have come true. We are reiterating our call to dismantle ObamaCare and to replace it with patient-centered reforms that will help bring down the cost, will not limit patient choices, and which will address most of the biggest problems in our broken health care system.

There are other areas such as preexisting conditions, young adult coverage, that we could readily agree on. Those are not debatable. I think the fact that the distinguished majority whip has suggested you have to have ObamaCare in order to get those is a gross exaggeration.

Remember, ObamaCare was sold as a policy that would expand health care coverage without raising costs, and without disrupting anyone's existing health care arrangement. It has proven to be a false promise on both of those counts. Despite the promises made in 2009 and 2010, promises that were repeated on the campaign trail in 2012, it is becoming increasingly evident that ObamaCare is making it harder for Americans to get or to keep the insurance coverage they already have, and which they want.

By the way, ObamaCare was sold to the American people as a way to get everybody covered with insurance. The Congressional Budget Office has documented that as many as 30 million Americans will remain uncovered even after ObamaCare is fully implemented. So you have not met the goal of universal coverage, the CBO says.

We are finding that rather than your costs going down, they are going up; you are finding that if you like what you have, you cannot keep it. Well, as Republicans have said all along, there are much better ways to expand health insurance coverage. I heard the majority whip this morning say they would like to hear our plan. Well, either their memory is faulty or they just were not listening.

ObamaCare regulations are incompatible with the genuine marketplace in health care insurance. They are incompatible with cost control. I think perhaps the best example I can think of is where the market actually works in conjunction with a government program, such as Medicare prescription drug coverage.

Remember when the Medicare prescription drug coverage plan was adopted, Medicare Part D, true competition in the market was created and vendors competed for the business of beneficiaries when it came to selling them their prescription drug plan. Lo and behold, due to the discipline and the competition, not only did quality of service go up and cost go down, we have seen that actually there is a 40-percent reduction, or I should say the cost of the plan is 40 percent under what was originally projected. That is something we could use with ObamaCare, which has been completely rejected. But that is why we believe we can replace ObamaCare with reforms that will make it easier for people to acquire or keep a health insurance plan that meets their actual individual needs.

My friends across the aisle continue to say we have not offered a practical alternative, but that is not true. Just to remind them, some of the alternatives we offered include equalizing the tax treatment of health care so individuals purchasing insurance on their own are on the same level playing field as those who have employer-provided coverage. We would let Americans buy their health insurance coverage across State lines, something that is now not currently permitted, which would increase competition and increase consumer choice. So if I found a policy I needed from Maryland or Massachusetts or anywhere else around the country, I could buy it. So could my 26 million constituents. We would let individuals in small businesses form risk pools in the individual market, which is the most expensive part of the insurance market, helping to bring costs down. We would make price and quality information more transparent, again to increase that discipline known as market forces, which would help improve consumer choice and, in the process, bring down cost, while improving quality of service.

We would also expand the power of individuals to control their own health care spending through tax-free health savings accounts, which also have the additional benefit of providing skin in the game for consumers. One of the reasons why our health care spending is so high and so worrisome is that for too long our health care coverage was like a credit card that each of us, or many of us--not all of us--85 percent of us had in our pocket, where we could continue to charge and charge, but we would never see the bill. Well, that is a recipe for a runaway system, which is the reason we do need true health insurance reform.

Part of that reform would be to control frivolous malpractice lawsuits that help drive up costs by increasing the incentives for defensive medicine, doctors treating patients not because they think it is called for based on clinical guidelines but, rather in their effort to say: I have conducted every test, I have done everything possible so I cannot get sued successfully. We would use high-risk pools to ensure that people with preexisting conditions could get coverage. We would give the States a lot more flexibility in how to manage Medicaid.

I read with interest that a lot of the increased coverage since ObamaCare passed is not in the exchanges but it is Medicaid, the Medicaid expansion. Well, in my State, Medicaid pays a doctor about 50 cents on the dollar for what private insurance pays that doctor. So only about one-third of doctors will actually see a new Medicaid patient, because the cost of doing so eats into their profit, and, indeed, may make their doing so completely unprofitable and nonviable. But we could improve Medicaid by creating more flexibility in the States to manage that beneficiary population and to expand coverage.

Then we would expand provider competition and patient choice and Medicare.

Those are nine different reform proposals we have been making since 2009 when ObamaCare was first being debated, but it is clear our colleagues across the aisle were so concentrated on this huge takeover of our health care system--one-sixth of our economy, in a way that we now know is not going to work--that they weren't even listening. I hope they will now.

While the reforms I have described enjoy broad support among Republicans on Capitol Hill, my hope is whether you were a critic of ObamaCare, as I was, or you were a skeptic and thought, well, maybe it will work but I am not sure it will, or whether you were one of its biggest cheerleaders--now that we are seeing these promises that were made by the President and others in order to sell this to the American people are not true, I am hopeful Democrats and Republicans can come together to try to fix our broken health care system. After witnessing ObamaCare's disastrous rollout and its long trail of broken promises, I think most Americans would agree it is time for something different.

I have read that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. ObamaCare is not going to get any better by continuing to do the same thing over and over. I hope we will learn from our mistakes, and we will work together to improve access and the price of health care to the American people.

I yield the floor.

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