Obamacare

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, this week the Republican-led Senate will keep a promise we made to the American people. If they entrusted us with the leadership and the majority in the last election, we told them we would vote to repeal ObamaCare--the largest Federal overreach in recent history. It has been disastrous to thousands, if not millions, of people.

Unfortunately, the President's ill-advised health care law and the partisan push that made it law came with a lot of burdensome regulations. Both the law and those regulations have hobbled the American economy because they simply added additional burdens onto the small businesses that we depend upon to create the jobs so people can find work and provide for their families. It has hobbled those small businesses by burdening them with unmanageable costs, and it has failed the American people at every turn.

When the President said ``If you like what you have you can keep it,'' that was not true. Millions of Americans lost their preferred health insurance providers and the doctors who accepted that coverage. Instead of providing people with more affordable access to health care, millions of people faced higher premiums and higher deductibles. For all practical matters, the higher deductibles that come along with most ObamaCare health care policies make millions of Americans effectively self-insured.

More than 5 years after it became law, it is no surprise that a recent poll found that only 37 percent of the respondents approved of ObamaCare. ObamaCare is a textbook example of how bigger government does not necessarily lead to more choices or real solutions. Indeed, what it demonstrates is that it can lead to higher costs, inefficient health care delivery, and millions of Americans being let down by a system that was a partisan vote here in the Senate.

I remember being here on Christmas Eve in 2009 at 7 o'clock in the morning when Senate Democrats pushed through the ObamaCare legislation in the Senate. Again, without any sort of bipartisan commitment to actually improve health care choices and make health care more affordable for the American people, it was purely a partisan undertaking.

This bill that we are voting on to repeal ObamaCare will not only provide relief and more choices and the opportunity for the market to give people the health care they want at a price they can afford, but it also represents keeping a promise we made to the American people that we would deliver on if they gave us the majority. We will do that this week.

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