Nomination of Patricia M. Wald to be a Member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board

Floor Speech

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Mr. COATS. Mr. President, I join my colleagues as one who has received tweets and hits on the Web site, emails, phone calls ringing the phone off the hook, written letters, responses that I hear as I talk to people back in Indiana. These are not Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservatives; they are all of the above. They are not writing to say: Stand with the Republican Party. Stand with this. Stand with that. They are writing to say: Wait a minute. The President promised that we would not have an increase in our premiums. He promised that if we liked our doctor, we could keep our doctor. He promised this would be affordable.

Tell that to Deborah from Logansport, who said that her increases in premiums will strain an already strained budget. I think she speaks for millions of Americans, tens of millions of Americans--a lot of Hoosiers, that is for sure.

Doug, a small business owner from Bloomington, told me that he expects his company health insurance to increase over 30 percent next year and, he said, ``this will preclude me from providing wage raises to our employees and will make hiring additional employees much less attractive, if not impossible.''

The President promised a lot. The worst thing you can do to your constituents, the people you represent, the people who put their trust in you, is overpromise and underperform. This could be the biggest gap between overpromising and underperforming of anything any President has said in the history of the United States. And he punctuated his statements with ``period,'' meaning ``take it to the bank. Count on it. Trust me. Your premiums won't increase.'' It is sad.

It is sad, but it can be corrected. We can work. We can repeal this now. We can work together on a bipartisan basis. We can fashion a reasonable, affordable solution to providing Americans who are uninsured with insurance, creating the kinds of products through an open market system, a competitive system that will deal with this problem. We do not have to keep swallowing this so-called Affordable Care Act. It simply will not go down.

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