Women's Access to Health Care

Floor Speech

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, like many of my colleagues I am deeply disappointed that Republican leaders have dedicated this week to partisan, political attacks rather than working with us to deliver results to the families we represent. So I wish to take a few minutes today to talk about the work we could and should be doing and make clear again that Republican efforts to undermine families' health care are nothing but a dead end.

I am pleased that over the last few months Democrats and Republicans have been able to work together on some very important issues. We passed another bipartisan budget deal. We have worked on a bill together to fix the No Child Left Behind law that is broken, and Republicans and Democrats are now working to pass a transportation bill that would do a lot to help fix our crumbling infrastructure. But there is certainly a lot more that we should be doing to boost wages, to expand opportunity, and to make sure our economy is growing from the middle out, not from the top down. I would hope that we would be working on a way to raise the minimum wage or ensure that working parents can earn paid sick days or make higher education more affordable and accessible for our students.

With the holidays just around the corner, we should be focused on what struggling families need to make ends meet. Those are the kinds of issues I would like to be working on and many more, but instead Republican leaders are insisting on tilting at tea party windmills by trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act for the umpteenth time.

This bill is not going to be signed into law. As we all know, this is just a political gesture here. But I want to be very clear about what it would mean for millions of men, women, and children across the country if this were to be signed into law. The policies that are being put forward could cause millions of people to lose their health care coverage, make premiums skyrocket, increase costs for our hospitals and for our providers, cut off support for important public health programs by repealing the prevention fund, and take us back to the bad old days when insurance companies, not patients, had all of the power.

Democrats believe strongly that while the Affordable Care Act was an historic step forward, the work did not end when the law passed--far from it.

We are willing to work with anyone on either side of the aisle who has good ideas about how to build on the progress that has been made so far and continue making health care more affordable, expanding coverage, and improving quality of care for our families.

So it is very disappointing that Republicans instead continue to insist that when it comes to health care, politics--not families--comes first. This is especially because--again to be very clear--this legislation has no chance of becoming law. The very same is true when it comes to this latest attempt to cut off women's access to health care.

After years of trying to turn back the clock on women's constitutionally protected rights and to undermine Planned Parenthood, Republicans should have gotten their fill of political attacks on women's health. Clearly, they have not.

In the wake of the tragedy in Colorado Springs last week, I have thought a lot about how important it is that we do more to insure communities are protected from that kind of violence and that we continue to stand with Planned Parenthood as it helps so many people--women and men--get the care they need.

So it is very frustrating that my Republican colleagues are doubling down this week on their efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and get in between women and their health care. If Republicans were to succeed in the bill they have before us in defunding Planned Parenthood--our Nation's largest women's health care provider--with the legislation we are debating today, they would undermine a critical source of health care that one in five women have relied on for cancer screenings, for HIV tests, and for so much more. They would make it harder for women to exercise their constitutionally protected right to make their own choices about their own bodies and their own doctors.

By dismantling critical health care reforms, this proposal would cause millions of women to lose their health care coverage and access to everything from birth control to prenatal care.

That is simply not going to happen--not on my watch, not on Democrats' watch, and not on President Obama's watch. Republicans may want to go back to the days when being a woman was a preexisting condition. They may see this entire bizarre effort as nothing more than a great opportunity to pander to their extreme tea party base by attacking health care and Planned Parenthood. But for millions of women and families, the policies we are debating today are no political exercise; instead, if enacted, they would represent a deeply harmful step backward--a step away from building a health care system that is affordable, accessible, and high quality, one that contributes to economic security and opportunity.

Women and families have seen these extreme Republican attempts many times before, and, frankly, I think they have had enough. They don't want Congress fighting over whether to roll back a law that has helped millions of people get health care coverage and bolstered our Nation's health care system, a law that has been upheld time and time again by the Supreme Court, and they believe firmly that politicians in Congress should have better things to do than interfere with women's constitutionally protected health care choices. I am sure they would rather see us working to actually improve health care and the many other challenges our country faces.

Democrats agree with that. We want to move health care forward, not backward, for women and families, and we want to do the other important work across the aisle to strengthen our economy and grow our middle class. So today, as my Republican colleagues double down on their partisan political pandering, we on this side are going to continue to stand up for family health care and stand up for women and their rights every step of the way. I hope my Republican colleagues will finally drop the politics and join us.

I yield the floor.

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