BREAK IN TRANCRIPT
Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, over the next several months the Affordable Care Act is going to become less important as a Republican campaign issue because more and more Americans--from young adults all the way through seniors--are going to realize the benefits it has to offer. It is happening already.
Every day there are more positive stories about people getting cheaper coverage, better coverage or coverage for the first time. Let me say, in my State of New York the initial rollout of ACA has been a big success. We didn't have the problems of a Web site because we did our own, and because we have a lot of competition, as was intended on the exchanges, people are getting very good offers and a large number of people are getting their costs reduced.
I will tell one story. A friend of mine goes to a hairdresser in a conservative neighborhood in New York. The person who owns the beauty shop is very conservative, and when the ACA first rolled out she was very upset. She said: Look. I have looked at that Web site. I am a nice person. I pay for health care for my eight employees. It is going to cost me hundreds of dollars more for each employee. I don't even know if I can afford to stay in business. That person talked to all of her friends, I think she blogged on her Web site, and talked all about it.
I spoke to my friend a few weeks ago. Guess what. This same person actually got health care on the New York Web site which reduced the cost of health care for employees by a couple of hundred dollars each. She was very happy. Of course, I asked my friend to make sure she puts that on her Web site and tells all of her conservative friends about that.
But this story is going to be repeated over and over. There are going to be millions of seniors who realize they can get a free checkup and keep their health good. There are going to be millions of young people who realize they can continue their health care and stay on their parents' health insurance from age 21 to 26. Millions of people are going to find out that either, God forbid, someone in their family or someone in a family they know has a preexisting condition, and now they can get health care. Millions of businesses are going to see the cost of health care is actually going up at a much smaller rate than they are used to. So all these good things will start mounting and the positives about ACA will grow in the public's mind and eventually I believe it will catch up in the Senate and the House. Then something else too will happen and that is this: Lots of people who are not affected directly by ACA have had fear put into their souls. They listen to the rightwing talk radio and they hear: Oh, they may lose all their health care or their costs will go way up. But what they are finding is it is not happening.
I met a firefighter who works for New York City--not a volunteer firefighter--a few months ago. He said: I know ObamaCare is going to kill me. It is going to greatly reduce the health care I am getting as a New York City firefighter.
They get very good health care and they should. They are risking their lives for us. He said: It is going to happen, I hear, in the new year, January 1, 2014.
I saw the firefighter a few weeks ago, and he said to me: Hey, I still have my health care and nothing changed. Well, of course nothing changed. All the horror stories which have been launched by so many on the rightwing talk radio and those who just hate ObamaCare, whether it works or not, are starting to fade.
So we are seeing two things happen at once: We are seeing the positives increase and the negatives decrease and we are seeing it particularly with senior citizens. Because the doughnut hole is filled, millions of our senior citizens are spending much less on prescription drugs than they had to. It is a huge benefit to them. Since ACA was enacted, more than 7 million seniors and people with disabilities have saved $9 billion. That is a huge amount of money. To seniors, many of whom are on fixed incomes, that is dramatic savings for them.
Something else is happening to our seniors. They are getting free checkups. That does two things. First, it saves money out of their own pockets but, second, it reduces our health care costs because we all know an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Free checkups are that prevention we need. It will not only save the seniors but save our system billions and billions of dollars in the years and decades to come. Somebody who finds a growth on their skin and gets it removed before it becomes cancerous, somebody who might get a colonoscopy, a mammogram or a prostate exam and is saved from prostate cancer--all that is going to happen.
So the bottom line is very simple: People are learning the positives of ACA. The Web site is being improved. More people are signing up. In my State of New York alone, more than 250,000 people with Medicare saved $246 million on prescription drugs. The numbers are higher when we count up to today because that was only the first 10 months, through November 1 of 2013. The benefits are all over the place.
One other thing. This is not our subject of the week, but I think we have to keep mentioning it. We are reducing the budget deficit through the ACA. I know our colleagues on the other side of the aisle are very careful about the budget deficit. Good. They should be. Health care costs are declining and declining significantly. Some is due to the recession, but almost every expert says much is due to the ACA.
National health care expenditures, for instance, in 2012 grew by 3.7 percent, meaning that the growth from 2009 to 2012 was the slowest since government collected this information in the 1960s. The percentage of health care spending for the first time actually shrunk from 17.3 to 17.2. At the same time, the solvency of Medicare's hospital insurance fund increased and costs declined. So this is great news.
The bottom line: I know our colleagues on the other side of the aisle think they hit political goals when they attack the ACA and call for its repeal, but the American people don't want repeal. Secondly, as we move on in time the positives of ACA will become more apparent, the negatives people perceive of ACA will decline, and I believe by November this issue will not be the political gold mine our colleagues think it is.
I yield the floor.
BREAK IN TRANCRIPT