Nomination of Sylvia Mathews Burwell to be Secretary of Health and Human Services

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I rise for a moment to talk about the Sylvia Burwell nomination, pending confirmation to be Secretary of Labor at HHS, and also to talk about the Affordable Care Act, because you can't separate the two.

I have the good fortune of being on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and the Finance Committee. The good fortune of that is it allowed me to twice be able to interrogate--and I use the word interrogate understanding its many definitions--Ms. Burwell over issues that were important to me both in the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, as well as in the Finance Committee.

I found her to be articulate, forthright, straightforward, and candid--something we haven't had in the Secretary of Labor-HHS for the last year or so. I am looking forward to having somebody in there who will be able to answer the hard questions. I might not like the answer, I might not agree with the solutions, but I like having somebody who has the intellect, the capability, and the willingness to communicate with Members of Congress, regardless of their party. So I will vote for Sylvia Burwell to be confirmed as Secretary of Labor and HHS, and I wish her the best.

No one should confuse that vote, however, for being a vote in support of the Affordable Care Act and what it is doing to health care in the United States today. I want to talk about that for a second. Some of these things I want to talk about are questions I asked Ms. Burwell in the confirmation hearing.

When I was on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and we did the markup in terms of the health care bill, we met for 69 1/2 hours. I heard every debate on every amendment; I heard every debate on every philosophy; I heard every proposal that was made, and it became quite clear to me that the premise of that legislation, based on the President's recommendation, was diametrically opposed to my personal philosophy in terms of where government's role should be.

I think the President--and it has been said by the leader Harry Reid recently--thought a single-payer health care system was the right way to go. I think the Affordable Care Act is designed to drive America toward a single-payer health care system.

I would rather have a competitive private sector system that is on a playing field that the government makes sure is fair and level but that the winners and losers in health care become those who compete the best in terms of quality and service.

In fact, the intent of the ObamaCare act and Affordable Care Act has directed a lot of things to happen. Three of them were not good.

Premiums have gone up. The costs to the consumer have gone up, principally because taxes have been levied on the insurance industry. That is No. 1.

Access has been more limited and more restricted based on the Bronze Plan, the Silver Plan, the Gold Plan, and differences between the exchanges.

Third and foremost, there is a great uncertainty in America about what happens next and where health care is going, because the President has selectively given waivers and put off the impact of certain provisions of the law, while lifting up and actually repealing with his own signature and his own pen provisions that were in the law. So there is a lot of uncertainty.

Two things I want to focus on from the cost standpoint. One of them is what is called the HIT, the health insurance tax, which went into effect this year. This year $8 billion in taxes were levied against small- and medium-size group insurance providers in the exchanges for health care. It is an arbitrary number that was used to help determine and pay for the Affordable Care Act, and it is assessed based on the market share of the companies.

Think about this for a second. The U.S. Government is taxing health insurance providers based on their market share of health insurance, and adding that cost to where? To the premium that is paid by the consumer.

It has been estimated that the premium cost is going to go up about $512 a year for the average consumer, just in order for the moderately small- and medium-sized group provider to pay the fine or pay their share of the tax of $8 billion. That $8 billion in 2014, in 2019 goes to $14.3 billion and will go up ad infinitum as it will continue to climb--which means costs will continue to climb.

Access has been restricted because a lot of people aren't playing in the system. A lot of specialty hospitals have chosen not to join the plans. That has meant that specialty care to a lot of children and adults is not available.

Another problem we have had is with navigators, and I want to focus on the navigator point for a second, because it fundamentally underscores my belief in the private sector.

For years I ran a business. It was a business where we had some employees but mostly had independent contractors. We provided group medical benefits for our employees, but only access to salesmen who would sell group plan health plans for independent contractors.

They got a commission when they sold a plan, when they provided the services, and the employee or the independent contractor in my company decided to buy. What we did in the Affordable Care Act--or what the Affordable Care Act and those who voted for it did--it basically did away with all the salesmen in the country who were selling group medical plans to individuals and small businesses. Why? Because it had a medical-loss ratio maximum of 80 percent or 85 percent, meaning your medical costs had to be 80 percent to 85 percent of the premiums. Administrative costs could only be 15 to 20, and it counted the commission for selling the product as an administrative cost, which meant commissions weren't available to be paid.

So what happened? All the people in sales in terms of group medical insurance got out of the business and went to selling something else. What happened because of that? Navigators came about.

So we ended up hiring a bunch of unqualified, unknowledgeable, limited-talent people as navigators to offer to try and sell insurance under the new exchanges created by the ObamaCare act. What happened is sales of those policies were not very robust. In fact, it was very difficult for the President to get his minimum goal of 7 million people being covered. Why? Because the navigators weren't salesmen, No. 1; No. 2, they weren't as well educated as they should have been; and, No. 3, the States did not embrace it.

So that is the private sector solution that had been used for years and years in our country; that is, independent agents making sales of independent insurance products through independent contractors. That has now gone away. They have to now go find an employee who is a navigator, who has no incentive, because they are on a salary and not a commission, to provide a plan or to sell a plan. They merely are there to collect their paycheck and offer information, if in fact somebody can find them.

My point is this: Ms. Burwell is taking on a serious challenge in terms of Labor HHS. The Affordable Care Act presents a lot of problems in terms of access, cost, and quality of health care for the American people that will only get greater as the years go by. We are going to take somebody of her competence and her candid nature to help us join together to see to it that what has become a major problem that looms for our country, the Affordable Care Act, is revisited to look at a new way to go back to the private sector, go back to competition, go back to a level playing field and out of the business of selective taxation, less access, more cost, and more bureaucracy. That is what we have with the Affordable Care Act right now. That is what is untenable.

I wish Ms. Burwell the best. I intend to be very aggressive and active in my work on the Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions Committee and the Finance Committee in trying to get to the bottom of some of the questions that have gone unanswered from the Department. I wish her the best, and I hope I get the answers to those questions when she is confirmed as the new Secretary of HHS.

I yield the floor.

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