Repeal of Obamacare Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.

Let me say it this way, Mr. Speaker. This bill barely passed into law. It was the biggest social legislation to pass into law in over 40 years. Seven votes in the House, no votes to spare in the Senate, Christmas Eve, backroom deal, and it was based on three promises by the President of the United States. One, if you like the health insurance you have, you can keep it. That's a broken promise. Two, this will bring down our health care premiums. That's a broken promise. Three, there's no tax on people making less than $200,000 in this bill. That's a broken promise. Well, the President said, to get it passed, there was no tax. Then, he sent his lawyer to the Supreme Court to argue that it was a tax so he can keep it on the books.

If any of these three broken promises were known to the public and to Congress at the time they were passing this law, the law would have never passed in the first place. We now have this information. Let's revisit this.

With that, I look forward to a hardy debate with my good friend from Maryland (Mr. Van Hollen), and I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Mr. Speaker, let me yield myself 30 seconds to simply comment.

We know the CBO is going to give us a score perhaps in a couple of weeks, and it's going to be more expensive. That much we know. We know States will probably put more people on ObamaCare instead of Medicaid, which will cost more dollars. The only reason this bill ``on paper'' saves money is because they told CBO to score 10 years of tax increases of Medicare savings to pay for 6 years of spending.

You can contort, distort, and torture statistics long enough, and eventually they will confess. That's what happened here. In reality, I have no doubt that this will be a budget buster.

With that, I would like to yield 1 minute to the distinguished member of the Budget Committee, the gentleman from California (Mr. McClintock).

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Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Mr. Speaker, here's why we're doing this. If the facts that we now know today about this law were available when this law was being debated, there's no way this would have become law. This is effectively a government takeover of 17 percent of our economy, the health care sector. It was sold on a number of promises by the President that are now broken promises.

Taxes? There are 21 tax increases in this law, 12 of which hit people who are low- and middle-income earners.

Do you remember the line: If you like the health care plan you have, you can keep it? Completely not true.

What about the idea that this is going to lower health care premiums? They've been going up ever since the law passed. They're going up next year. They're going up even more.

Here's the fear. What we worry is going to happen, what is happening, is you're going to have what we call BUCAA, about five health insurers left: Blue Cross, United, Cigna, Aetna, and Anthem. That's the big joke in Washington. You'll have about five big, massive health insurers who are de facto public providing government extension companies like your utility company, except they're going to be controlling your health care.

People say we should focus on jobs instead of this bill. This is about jobs. The CBO is telling us it could cost us 800,000 jobs.

I remember talking to an employer in southern Wisconsin not too long ago, family business, a big family business, a private business. The woman who runs this business, whose grandfather founded it, had tears coming down her face because she provides health insurance for her employees at about $17,000 per year for a family plan. She's proud to do it.

Her competitors notified her at one of her trade association meetings--they're publicly traded--that they're going to have to dump everybody in ObamaCare and just pay the $2,000 per person fine; $15,000 difference, per person, between herself and her competitors.

She was telling me that she felt she had no choice but, when the time came, to dump her people into ObamaCare.

That's what's going to happen in this country: People will get dumped into ObamaCare; ObamaCare will underpay providers; providers will go out of business; they'll overcharge the private sector; and we'll get a vicious cycle.

Here is the awful irony about this. We can have affordable access to health insurance for everybody in America, including people with preexisting conditions, without this government takeover. That's why we do believe in replace. That's why we advocated then, and we continue to advocate today, for patient-centered health care reforms.

Deal with the discriminatory tax treatment on health care. Get transparency in price, quality, and outcome so people can really shop. Have pooling mechanisms so people can bulk buy health insurance.

Help those with preexisting conditions. Save Medicare and Medicaid by harnessing the power of choice and competition. Have the providers compete against each other for our business as patients, instead of hoping that the whims of some government bureaucrat will favor us when they make their next price controlling and rationing decision.

We can do better than this.

Here's ultimately why we're doing this, Mr. Speaker. A few weeks ago we had two chances to repeal and, therefore, replace this law. Now we have one. The Supreme Court upheld this law. That doesn't make it good policy.

The one chance left--and yes, this is the 31st time. And I fear we're going to have to do it the 32nd time, because the one chance left is that the American people, through their elected representatives, through the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the President, has one more chance before this law is actually implemented in 2014 to repeal this law and replace it with true patient-centered health care reform, and that is why we're doing this today.

With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

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