OFFICIALS LEGISLATION INTEREST GROUPS PUBLIC STATEMENTS COMMITTEES VETOES

Obamacare

Floor Speech

Date: Nov. 5, 2015
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Health Insurance

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Mr. President, I remember a recent time when President Obama tried to spin Americans on ObamaCare. The best he could muster then was a condescending, sort of cringe-inducing message that likely turned off more people than it converted. He even said that Americans who already had health insurance ``may not know that they've got a better deal now [under ObamaCare] than they did, but they do.''

As I said, it was condescending and cringe-inducing. It was so out of touch with the priorities of America's middle class.

Well, it looks as though the President is going to try again today with a series of regional TV interviews. He will do so with headlines such as these as a backdrop: CBS, ``Affordable Care Act not so affordable''; AP, ``More than half of health law's insurance co-ops are closing.'' Here is a headline about the President's home State: ``Some Obamacare marketplace prices see double-digit jump in Illinois.'' And here is one about mine: ``Health co-op closes, 51,000 need new insurance.'' This is on top of the massive premium increases so many Kentuckians have faced.

This isn't just a Kentucky story or an Illinois story. In every corner of the country, we see story after story about sharply rising premiums. The largest insurers in Tennessee have rates going up 36 percent. A large insurer in Oklahoma is raising premiums by 35 percent. In Hawaii, families are looking at increases of 26 and 34 percent. It is easy to glaze over the numbers, but this is real money coming out of the pockets of real families. This is money that could help send a child to college or put Thanksgiving dinner on the table, but instead it will go to insurance bills made unnecessarily expensive in part because of ObamaCare's costly rules and regulations.

Perhaps the President will settle today for trying to convince Americans that ObamaCare's Web site is at least working better than in years past, but that just means it will be a little easier for middle-class families to pay more for unaffordable health insurance and higher out-of-pocket costs. That is hardly the makings of better headlines or better outcomes for the American people.

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