Health Care

Floor Speech

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Mr. COATS. Mr. President, I think nearly every Member of this body shares the goal of increasing access to affordable health insurance and helping American families receive the best coverage to meet their specific needs. So the question before us today--and the question before us this entire Congress--is how are these goals being achieved. This has been an issue we have been debating since 2010, when ObamaCare was signed into law.

Based on the extraordinary feedback from Hoosiers, regardless of party affiliation or ideology, the overwhelming number of messages that have been sent to my office, and that I have heard while traveling across the State of Indiana, suggest that the Affordable Care Act has turned out to be a dismal failure. It is hurting more families than it is helping.

To top it all off, the administration, late last Friday afternoon once again cut one of the most popular programs available to seniors--Medicare Advantage. We have 230,000 Hoosiers enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans who could be told major cuts will be made to their plans in order to pay for ObamaCare.

What an irony. We pass a program to provide health care coverage for senior citizens. They sign up for the program. They make the choice on their own to pay higher costs for Medicare Advantage so they get better coverage, and the administration simply says: We need to rebalance things so we are going to do everything we possibly can to make it more difficult and more expensive. This was their choice, but the administration is saying: We are going to make it our choice that this program is going to be reduced and much harder to engage in.

Consider what is happening. This administration is cutting billions of dollars from Medicare Advantage--an extremely popular program not just in my State but across this country--to pay for ObamaCare, which is extremely unpopular. So the administration takes a plan that works, a plan that people support, because it is their choice and they are willing to pay for it, and the administration says: No, we are going to take that away from you so we can cover the cost for a plan that is not popular. This is the irony of ironies, particularly in terms of meeting the goal that I think all of us want to meet.

So we have yet another broken promise. The President so famously said over and over again: If you like your plan, you can keep it. If you make a choice as to how you want to be covered, what benefits you want to have, what premium you want to pay, you can keep that--but now he is saying, well, no, effectively, you can't keep it because we are going to take that away from you.

It is no wonder I receive tens of thousands of pieces of mail and phone calls from Hoosiers all across my State saying: I got duped here. I got lured into something that supposedly was going to make medical care less costly; that I would be able to keep my doctor, I would be able to stay with my hospital, I would be able to keep the benefits in the plan I chose, and now I am being told, no, none of that is going to work.

As was just stated by Senator Cornyn of Texas, there is a bipartisan effort underway to send a message to the President. It urges the President to preserve Medicare Advantage and the incentives to join it. I know the President doesn't want to listen to Republicans and have them tell him what is happening in their States, what their suggestions are as to what to do to fix this disaster of a health care plan, but maybe he should listen to Members of his own party. There is a significant number of Democrats who have said: We don't want these cuts to be imposed on Medicare Advantage. We don't want to go home and tell our constituents they can no longer have their Medicare Advantage plan.

So if the President doesn't want to listen to us, I fully understand that. He has made that very clear. But perhaps he should listen to Members of his own party and listen to what they are saying. Let's give people the ability to make choices and keep the plan they have chosen and not have it taken away by a bureaucracy that simply makes decisions for them.

With that, I yield the floor.

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