Restoring Americans' Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. CASSIDY. I say to Senator Alexander, one of the ironies of this is that it was promoted as a way to help lower income families make ends meet better. But if you require employers to provide insurance to low-wage workers, the predictable response of an employer who has thin margins is to actually convert those full-time workers to part-time workers. This doesn't happen for the CEO or for the CEO's lieutenants, and it doesn't happen for middle management. The folks it happens most to are those lower paid workers.

I once went grocery shopping in Baton Rouge, and a woman rung me up. The next day my wife sent me to another store to get something else at another store. The same woman was ringing me up. I said: I just saw you at that store, but now I see you at this store. She said--I am paraphrasing--my first employer reduced my hours, so now I have had to take a second job to make ends meet.

Now, that is the personal story. But what the labor statistics show is that since the recession has technically ended, the hours worked per week have recovered for higher income workers, but as for the lower income workers, they have continued to suffer. The most vulnerable have been the most affected in terms of hours worked, but it is not just the most vulnerable, it is also the middle class.

The New York Times wrote an article 2 weeks ago. The headline says it all:

``Many Say High Deductibles Make Their Health Law Insurance All But Useless.'' They quote a gentleman, David Reines from New Jersey. He is 60 years old. He said:

The deductible, $3,000 a year, makes it impossible to actually go to the doctor. ..... We have insurance, but can't afford to use it.

So it is the middle-income worker who also has a policy which previously would have allowed him or her to go to the doctor. Now they can't because the way ObamaCare is so structured is that it is too expensive for that out-of-pocket first exposure.

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Mr. CASSIDY. When it comes to insurance premiums, you can't make this up.

This is a fellow from Homewood, LA. His first name is Mark; we scratched out his last name. This is his letter from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana informing him that his policy, which had previously been $207 per month, was going up in 2016 to $961 per month. His policy, which had been roughly $2,400 a year, is going up to $11,500 a year. And this is because of the Affordable Care Act--the Unaffordable Care Act.

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Mr. CASSIDY. The way the market has responded, in order to make insurance affordable despite the mandates, is there are so-called narrow networks. So someone signs up for the most affordable policy they can get. It turns out that the doctor they previously saw is not on this plan. So the narrow network is going to be just a small set of doctors. The specialists may be in another town; one hospital, not all hospitals. And patients are unfamiliar with this. They did not expect it. But that was their only affordable option. The mandates have driven up the costs so much.

By the way, going back to the letter you got about the mandated benefits, in my recent campaign, I had a woman walk up to me, and she said: My name is Tina, and I am angry. I had a hysterectomy. I am 56 years old and I have no children. My husband and I are paying $500 more per month for insurance, which we cannot afford, and I am paying for pediatric dentistry, and I am paying for obstetrical services.

She had had a hysterectomy, was 56 years old, and had no children.

Another woman--she was 58 and her husband was 57--told me: The only reason I would need obstetrical services, which I am forced to buy, is if my name is Sarah and my husband is Abraham, but that is not the case.

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Mr. CASSIDY. There is a fellow who started a medical device startup in New Orleans, and he was saying that he had an offer to move his business to Panama because a major portion of his market is overseas.

So the medical device tax is, of course, a tax upon the gross of a business. If he moves overseas to Panama, taking those jobs with him, and continues to sell internationally and not pay tax on that but is taxed only on that which he brings back to the United States, then he is obviously reducing his tax burden. Those are high-paying, white-collar jobs in New Orleans, a city recovering from Katrina. If the power to tax is the power to destroy, this tax has the power to destroy the ability of this gentleman to continue to expand in New Orleans.

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Mr. CASSIDY. Louisiana's co-op failed. It attempted to lower costs with a skinny network, but ultimately it still could not compete.

If I may point out, we have talked about how the low-wage worker has had her opportunity diminished by the law. We discussed how the middle-class family, who oftentimes had insurance they were told they could keep, lost it, and now they have a deductible of $3,000, which they say makes the insurance something they cannot afford. We are speaking about the U.S. taxpayer. The U.S. taxpayer has put billions of dollars toward these co-ops. There is some evidence that the administration continued to put money into them even when they knew they were going to fail, and yet now they are failing--over half and supposedly more slated to do so. It isn't just the low-wage worker and the middle-class family; it is all the taxpayers who have taken a hit for promises made but promises broken.

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