National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017--Motion to Proceed
Floor Speech
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Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk once again about the health care law.
This past weekend I was home in Wyoming--as I am just about every weekend--visiting a community called Lovell, WY. At Lovell, we had a health and fitness fair that was focused on kids and adults in terms of prevention of problems and early detection of problems. They could get their blood tests done there. In talking to hundreds of people there at the hospital, what I heard again and again, as I do each weekend, is that this health care law is having a negative impact, a hurtful impact on the people of my home State of Wyoming.
I want to spend a little time today talking about what is happening there. On Monday night, Senator Enzi and I had a chance to have a telephone townhall meeting. We talked to a lot of people around the State, and this continues to come up: the high increases in costs, in spite of what the President promised. He promised that insurance rates would go down by $2,500 per family if his health care law was passed and signed. In fact, the exact opposite has occurred. Today I had lunch with a number of students from Lander, WY, in Freemont County, and again this came up as a topic of discussion.
What we see is that the insurance companies at this time of year are turning in their rate requests--the requests they have to increase their rates for next year.
I am going to talk about places all over the country now because it is not just Wyoming that is suffering under the President's health care law, it is all around the country.
Families in Iowa now know that their insurance company wants to raise premiums by as much as 43 percent for some plans. Some families in New York have learned that their rates may be going up as much as 46 percent. Let's turn to New Hampshire. There are families in New Hampshire who have gotten the news that they could be paying 45 percent more. So when we look State by State by State, what we are seeing across the country is rates going up dramatically, impacting the ability of people to even afford their insurance.
A health care group looked at nine States where information has been released. They found what they call a standard shopper for insurance. The average cost of a silver plan--the most commonly sold plan--will go up 16 percent next year. That is for a typical, say, 50-year-old person who doesn't smoke. It adds to an average cost of about $6,300 per year for that person trying to buy insurance.
What we are seeing today is more and more people getting sticker shock under ObamaCare. The health care law has created so many problems for the American public--for taxpayers--because taxes have gone up as a result of this for providers of health care and certainly for patients. The health care law has caused mandates. It has put restrictions in place. It has been made so expensive that most people think it is not a good deal for them personally, which is why, in terms of the number of people who were uninsured when the law was passed, fewer than one in three of them have actually signed up for ObamaCare. That is because all these mandates and all these restrictions have made insurance much more expensive when it comes down to actually trying to get care.
Let me point out that the President is very specific when he talks. He doesn't talk about people getting care; he talks about coverage.
The headlines in the New York Times have been that there are a lot of people with coverage who can't get care. There was a story last week about so many people in New York City who feel that ObamaCare is a second-class program. They have that insurance card, but it doesn't help them get to see a doctor--certainly not one they want or need for the problems they are having.
Some insurance companies have lost so much money by selling insurance on the ObamaCare exchange that they have decided to drop out of the exchanges entirely. They said: We are done with it. We can't afford to continue to sell it this way.
We know the insurance company Humana is dropping out of several States. We know that UnitedHealthcare is leaving all but a handful of States. In Colorado, 20,000 people have received letters saying that they are losing their insurance plan next year because companies cannot afford to sell it. And it is only going to get worse.
According to a recent survey by McKinsey & Company, it turns out that only one out of every four health insurance companies made a profit last year. Those are the ones I am talking about specifically selling insurance on the ObamaCare exchange. So one out of four made a profit; three out of four lost money. And we say: How is it that they were able to make a profit?
Well, this is what they did: The ones that were able to make a profit tended to be companies that have a lot of experience offering Medicaid insurance. Basically, they took their Medicaid plans and sold them to people on the ObamaCare exchange. These are plans with very narrow networks of doctors, so you can't just go to any doctor you like, and they have very narrow numbers of hospitals, so you can't go to any hospital you like. For these specific companies, a lot of these plans are ones that have very high deductibles. So somebody may have an insurance card, but the deductible is so high--the dollar-for-dollar out-of-their-pocket expense--that they say they can't afford to see a doctor, and they have ObamaCare, which they are finding is essentially useless for them.
There were different levels of insurance plans that ObamaCare came out with--bronze, silver, gold, and platinum. Most of the people have been choosing the silver plans because that was thought to be sort of the midrange plan. Well, now those silver plans are coming with very high costs. This means that people may be paying, again, for coverage, but they are not getting care.
There is a company in Virginia. They have decided they are getting rid of the bronze plan entirely. They have said ``No, we are not going to sell the bronze plan anymore,'' and they are pushing all of their customers up into the silver plan. They are doing this, but if you are one of the people who had the bronze plan that they are not going to sell anymore, you can see your rates going up 70 percent from what you were paying this year--an increase of 70 percent. Some of these silver plans have gotten so inadequate that they are now what the bronze plans used to be. This is all as a result of what the Obama administration forced down the throats of the American public and every Democrat voted for and every Republican voted against.
One insurance company is actually offering a silver plan next year that comes with a deductible of more than $7,000. Now, that is how much someone would need to pay out of their pocket before insurance actually kicked in. Blue Cross of Idaho is talking about a deductible of $6,850 for their silver plan. That is for the silver plan--the one that Democrats said was supposed to be the benchmark plan, the one that the subsidies are linked to.
Let's think about what a $6,850 deductible means for most people. According to a new poll out by the Associated Press, two-thirds of Americans say they would have a hard time actually coming up with $1,000 for an emergency. So, then, how are they supposed to come up with over $6,800 in case of a situation that they may find confronting them?
These kind of plans, where people pay a lot and don't get much in return, are what President Obama and the administration used to call ``junk insurance.'' I remember the President talking about that. ``Junk insurance'' is what he said. He said that the health care law would stop that; that would never happen under an Obama administration and an Obama plan. Instead, this President, under ObamaCare, is pushing more and more people into these kinds of plans, and this administration is even subsidizing them.
So premiums are going through the roof. The deductibles are going up so high that people have insurance--which is mandated by law that they have--but it turns out that, for many of them, it is useless. People may have to find a new primary care doctor or a new pediatrician every year because they are getting switched from plan to plan to plan because they can't afford the plan that they have, and the rates continue to go up. And the President, who had once said ``If you like your plan, you can keep it,'' now says ``Oh, no, you had better shop around.'' He said that if you like what you have, you can keep it. He completely flipped and now says that you had better shop around.
People continue to lose plans because insurance companies are going out of business or they just quit selling insurance entirely. To me, this is just one more sign that this health care law is a sinking ship. It is falling apart. And insurance companies have found that one reason they are losing so much money is that their customers are sicker than the President thought they would be and that the insurance companies thought they would be. The people who are healthy basically aren't interested in buying this very expensive insurance. They feel it is a waste of their money and would rather just pay the fine to the IRS.
On Monday, the head of the State ObamaCare co-op in New Mexico was on the television network CNBC, talking about this problem. His name is Dr. Martin Hickey, and he is the CEO of New Mexico Health Connections. His company is asking to raise premiums for some of its plans by 34 percent next year. Still, he said, ``With these heavy rate increases''--and these are heavy rate increases--``the problem is the people who are going to say `for a $695 penalty, to heck with it.' '' So of the people the President is mandating to buy insurance, many are saying, ``to heck with it.'' That is what we hear from this CEO.
Look, this is just what Republicans have been predicting ever since Democrats first brought this health care law to the floor and they passed this extraordinarily expensive law and mandates on the American public.
Dr. Hickey, CEO of New Mexico Health Connections, said, ``The healthy are abandoning insurance, and what you're left with is the sick, and you can never raise your rates high enough.'' That is not what Democrats promised. That is not what they stood up here on the floor and talked about. They promised--and so did President Obama--that the health care rates would go down. They promised insurance coverage would get better. It has not. It has gotten much worse. They promised that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. In many cases, you can't. They promised that if you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance. In many cases, you cannot.
People all across this country are getting a reminder of ObamaCare's broken promises as the health care requests for increases come out. Democrats want to double down on this failed health care law and add more mandates and more restrictions. They want more government control over people's health care.
It does seem that everything the Democrats propose just makes prices go up faster. That isn't what the American people wanted, and it is certainly not what we need from health care reform in this country. This law was passed 6 years ago, and it is getting worse every day.
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