Restoring Americans' Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, at a townhall meeting in Green Bay, WI, on June 11, 2009, President Obama was trying to sell his health care law, and this is the claim he made. This is the quote, and this is the promise he made to the American public. He said:

No matter how we reform health care, I intend to keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you'll be able to keep your doctor; if you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan.

Less than a week later, in remarks to the American Medical Association, the Nation's largest association of medical doctors, the President said:

I know that there are millions of Americans who are content with their health care coverage--they like their plan and, most importantly, they value the relationship with their doctor. They trust you. And that means that no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take that away, no matter what.

Now, a number of years have passed since President Obama made that promise. It wasn't just those two times that President Obama made that promise either. I think it has been documented that he made that promise to the American people over 30 times. Other supporters of the bill repeated that promise. It was a promise. It was a promise to the American public. It was a promise he knew would not be kept. It was a promise about which the supporters of the bill knew there was no way under ObamaCare that people would be able to keep their health care plan, that they would become able to keep and maintain the relationship with the doctor they trusted, knew, and had faith in.

President Obama called it a promise. PolitiFact had another name for it. PolitiFact, in 2013, termed that promise its ``Lie of the Year.'' Think of that. The President of the United States was trying to sell a massive restructuring of a health care system--and that is what he was trying to do. He was trying to sell it. He was marketing a bill, a law, a concept, and in order to market that concept, President Obama and other supporters of the bill repeatedly made a promise that PolitiFact termed the ``Lie of the Year'' of 2013.

I come from the private sector. It is incumbent on people in the private sector, when they are selling products to consumers, to tell the truth about the product. If you don't, you will be accused of consumer fraud. You can be sued. You can probably be sued out of existence. Imagine how the trial bar would treat a businessperson who tried to sell a product by making a promise that turned out to be 2013's ``Lie of the Year.'' I don't believe that business would be in business today.

ObamaCare, at its heart, is a massive consumer fraud--a massive consumer fraud. So the purpose of my amendment has the purpose of a piece of legislation I introduced in 2013--the same thing. It is designed to honor the promise that President Obama made and that he did not keep--the promise that was made under ObamaCare that was not kept.

The bill I introduced in 2013 was simply titled ``If You Like Your Health Care Plan, You Can Keep it Act.'' What is rather unique about my piece of legislation is that it used the exact same wording of ObamaCare. ObamaCare actually did have a section in it called a grandfather clause that purported to allow people to keep their health care and allowed them to maintain their relationship with their doctor if they liked their health care plan and their doctor. The problem is it was a grandfather clause that allowed you to keep your plan as long as you completely changed it. So what my bill in 2013 did was it just said: Listen, you can actually keep your health care plan and you don't have to change it.

That is what my amendment does today. It restores that promise--the promise of President Obama and the supporters of ObamaCare. Let me use the real name: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Of the Orwellian-named laws that have been passed through this Chamber, this is probably the most Orwellian because the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act did neither, because that promise was not kept.

It was a lie. Patients weren't protected. They lost their health care plan. We have all received letters from constituents, often heartbreaking letters. There was a couple in Wisconsin, they both had cancer. He is recovering from prostate cancer. She had stage IV lung cancer. They had health care in the State high-risk pool. They could afford it. It worked for them. They lost it because of ObamaCare. They called our office panicked--panicked--because they couldn't log on to healthcare.gov. They tried almost 40 times. They lost their health care plan. That promise was broken. I don't hear supporters of the law pointing to those individuals.

So my amendment would restore the promise that if you had health care that you liked in 2013, insurance companies can offer those same plans again. They were far more affordable--far more affordable. As I just stated with that one little example, patient protection in the Affordable Care Act didn't protect patients, and it certainly hasn't been more affordable. We have also received hundreds of letters from people whose premiums have doubled, their out-of-pocket maximum has doubled and tripled. They can't even afford to use the health care they were able to secure because it has become so expensive. The reality of ObamaCare is it has been a miserable failure, and the promises made under it literally were abject lies. That is the reality. That is the very sad fact.

I encourage all my colleagues to unanimously support the promise President Obama and the law's supporters made and vote for my amendment, which would allow Americans, if they like their health care plan, if they like their doctor, they actually will be able to keep it.

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