Restoring American's Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am on the floor to speak to the debate that is happening now on reconciliation, specifically, the fact that we are here for the 16th time in the Senate debating the repeal of all or significant parts of the Affordable Care Act, and stack that on top of the 50 to 60 times this has been debated--the repeal of all or major parts of the Affordable Care Act--in the House of Representatives. As many of us have said over and over, we think the debate over repeal is over and that we should, A, accept the success of the Affordable Care Act and, B, to the extent that there need to be changes made, do it on a bipartisan basis--find the ways we can work together to try to perfect a law that is by and large working.

The data only tells one story. I want to review it for a moment because if you hear many of my Republican colleagues talk, they act in the absence and in the denial of the overwhelming evidence that tells you the Affordable Care Act is working. There are 17 million Americans who have insurance today who didn't have it before the Affordable Care Act. They have gotten it either through these exchanges, these private health care exchanges with a tax credit from the Federal Government or they have gotten it through Medicaid expansion.

We have reduced the number of people without health care insurance in this country by 30 percent in the few first few years of implementation. That is with many States doing everything they can to undermine the act. That is with many States refusing to accept the expansion of Medicaid coverage that could make that number even greater than 17 million or 30 percent.

In my State of Connecticut, where we have been aggressively trying to implement the Affordable Care Act, we have actually reduced the number of people without insurance by 50 percent. The total numbers in Connecticut are pretty extraordinary, given the short amount of time we have had and given the fact that in Connecticut we had a pretty robust Medicaid Program to begin with.

Overall costs to the Federal Government are under control for the first time in many of our lifetimes. The average medical rate of inflation to the Federal Government is about 2 or 3 percent. The overall rate of medical inflation is the lowest since 1960. That is because the Affordable Care Act is transitioning payments away from volume-based payments, rewarding you for the more medicine you practice, to outcomes-based payments, rewarding you for keeping your patients healthy.

Quality is getting better. You look at a broad array of metrics. Things such as hospital readmission rates or hospital acquired infections are all going down. Let's be clear, the Affordable Care Act was not designed to fix every single problem in the health care system. There are still going to be problems, there are still going to be anecdotal failures, but if you are working to undermine the act in your State, you are going to have more problems with your health care system.

When I hear my colleagues come down to the floor of the Senate and complain about hospitals closing in their State, when their State is actively rejecting Federal money that would help expand Medicaid and provide more people walking into hospitals with reimbursement attached to them, there is more than a hint of irony to that complaint. If you want your health care system to work, then implement the Affordable Care Act.

AMENDMENT NO. 2875

Senator Johnson is offering an amendment which could be of particular harm to the people in my State and in neighboring States. His amendment would allow for plans that don't comport with minimum coverage requirements of the Affordable Care Act to continue to be offered.

Before I relinquish the floor, I wish to speak for a moment about this particular amendment. There is a little boy named Kyle from Simsbury, CT, whom I have talked about before on the floor. Kyle requires injections that cost about $3,000 per dose, and he has to take them three to four times a week for the treatment of a blood disorder. Because his previous insurance plan had an annual lifetime limit, his treatment threatened to bankrupt his family. That fear is no longer a reality for his family because the Affordable Care Act says if you want to offer an insurance plan in this country, it has to be a fair plan. It can't have annual or lifetime limits, and it can't charge you more because you are a woman. It has to cover basic medical necessities, such as maternity coverage.

The requirement of having insurance plans provide actual insurance that doesn't discriminate against a person based on their medical history or gender not only allows people to have access to health care they didn't have before, but it has given millions of families like Kyle's family peace of mind.

The Johnson amendment would take that peace of mind away from millions of families by allowing for plans to go back on the market throughout the country--plans that would cap coverage on an annual or lifetime basis and that could once again discriminate against you based on your gender or medical history.

There may be a lot of parts of the Affordable Care Act that people support or don't support. But the one thing that the people of all parties have generally supported is the idea that we should put patients and consumers back in charge of their health care, instead of the old days when the insurance companies were in charge and would tell you that you have insurance, but then halfway through the year, just because you used a lot of it, yank it away from you.

There are a number of reasons why we should reject this specific amendment, but on behalf of the millions of families like Kyle's out there that don't want to go back to a world in which their insurance companies could take away their coverage just because they needed it more than other families, their stories alone are example enough to reject this amendment.

I hope that we can move on from this debate and try to work together--Republicans and Democrats--to perfect the Affordable Care Act and that we can get beyond this perpetual, ongoing, never-ending debate about repeal. Specifically, with respect to the Johnson amendment, let's think about all of those families that have been jerked around by insurance companies for far too long and need relief that the Affordable Care Act has given them.

I yield the floor.

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