Water Resources Development Act of 2016--Motion to Proceed
Floor Speech
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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, as President Obama's Presidency draws to a close, talk tends to turn to his legacy. What will President Obama leave behind? Internationally, of course, he will leave behind a growing terrorist threat and an emboldened Iran on its way to becoming a nuclear power. Domestically, the President will leave behind a weak economy, as the recent economic growth numbers for the second quarter made clear. We grew at a little more than 1 percent. If you look at the historical average since World War II, average growth has been 3 percent, 3.5 percent. In fact, President Obama will be the only President in history--at least since they started keeping these sorts of numbers--who will not have had 1 year in his Presidency where the growth rate exceeded 3 percent.
Under his Presidency, we have averaged about 1.5 percent, so it is a sluggish, anemic economy that continues to keep wages at lower levels for American workers, the highest number of people who have left the labor force and lowest labor participation rate literally in 40 years. That is the economic legacy of the President.
Of course, the President will leave behind his signature law, ObamaCare. Many Democrats would still like to think of ObamaCare as the President's signature domestic achievement, but you can ask anybody to scan any newspaper, and you can see it is well on its way to being a disaster.
This is just a small sampling of recent ObamaCare headlines. From the New York Times, this headline read: ``Think Your ObamaCare Plan Will Be Like Employer Coverage? Think Again.''
From the Chicago Tribune: ``Illinois ObamaCare rates could soar as state submits insurance premium increases to feds.''
From the Washington Post: ``Health-care exchange signups fall far short of forecasts.''
From a Lancaster, PA, newspaper: ``Lancaster residents will have rising premiums, fewer choices from 2017 ObamaCare health plans.''
From the Wall Street Journal: ``Insurers Move to Limit Options in Health-Care Exchange Plans.''
From The Tennessean, quoting the Tennessee insurance commissioner: ``Tennessee insurance commissioner: Obamacare exchange `very near collapse.' '' That is a headline from The Tennessean.
I could go on. In fact, I could go on for a long time. Those are just a few of the headlines from the past 3 weeks. I could literally fill an entire speech with the negative ObamaCare headlines just this summer. Just to reiterate, these are newspaper headlines. These are not conservative talking points. ObamaCare is failing so badly that even those who might like to deny it cannot.
But let's get into the specifics. What exactly are consumers on the exchanges facing for this coming year? For starters, they are facing huge premium increases--36 percent, 43 percent, 19 percent, 22.9 percent, 89 percent. Those are some of the average rate hikes that Americans are facing around the country.
Let's break that down for just a minute. Let's say that your health care plan for 2016 costs $10,000. Let's say you are facing a 43-percent rate increase, which is the average rate increase facing Humana customers in the State of Mississippi. A 43-percent increase means you would have to pay an additional $4,300 for your health insurance next year--$4,300. That is a massive increase for so many individuals and families, and that is just the rate hike for 1 year.
Many people facing these kinds of increases already faced a substantial rate hike for 2016. Now they are expected to pay even more in 2017. Who knows what they will face in 2018. These kinds of rate hikes are completely unsustainable. Can you imagine? Just imagine if an individual's mortgage payment increased at a similar rate. Within a couple of years, most people wouldn't be able to afford to pay for their homes. While health insurance may seem like a significantly smaller part of the budget than a mortgage payment, the truth is, for many families it is not.
I have heard from at least one South Dakota family whose health insurance payments exceeded its mortgage payments. In Tennessee, individuals are facing average rate hikes ranging from 44.3 percent to 62 percent for 2017. How many families can absorb a 62-percent increase in their health care costs--and for just 1 year, a 1-year increase.
Residents in my State of South Dakota are also facing huge rate hikes. A 40-year-old nonsmoker in South Dakota faces a whopping 36- percent rate hike for a silver plan in 2017--36 percent in my State of South Dakota. I have to tell you that is simply not affordable for most South Dakotans.
What are consumers getting in exchange for their premium hikes? Too often the answer seems to be not much. For starters, many customers who are already paying massive premiums face thousands of dollars in deductibles on top of that--before their coverage even kicks in.
Then there are the increasingly narrow networks of doctors and hospitals on the exchanges. As the Wall Street Journal reported recently: ``Under intense pressure to curb costs that have led to losses on the Affordable Care Act exchanges, insurers are accelerating their move toward plans that offer limited choices of doctors and hospitals.''
The days of the President's ``if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor'' promise are long gone. Nowadays you have not only lost your doctor, you may have very few options to replace them. Of course, all of this is assuming you still have your health care plan.
Countless Americans this year are once again discovering the hollowness of the President's ``if you like your health care plan, you can keep it'' promise. Because the other side of the story is that insurers are dropping out of the exchanges in droves.
In August, insurance giant Aetna announced it is pulling out of 11 of the 15 States where it offers plans on the exchanges. Meanwhile, Humana is exiting several exchanges, while megainsurer UnitedHealthcare is pulling out of a whopping 31 States. What does this mean for consumers? Well, for many people it means they have lost their health care plan and their insurance company and that they may have very few options for replacing them. The President promised that choosing a health insurance plan would be like buying a TV on Amazon. For many people nowadays, going on healthcare.gov is akin to choosing a TV on Amazon if Amazon only offered one or two TVs.
According to a report released in August, one-third of the country may have just one insurer to pick from on the exchanges for next year. Well, if you don't like that insurance company, apparently it is your tough luck.
One county in Arizona may actually have no insurers from which to choose, not a single one. It is abundantly clear ObamaCare is failing American families, and even Democrats are starting to indicate they realize the current situation can't continue. Of course, Democrats' answers rarely involve going back to the drawing board to consider a better solution. Instead, Democrats generally offer proposals that involve throwing good money after bad. Democrats claim that more government is the solution. Throw more taxpayer money at the problem or let the government run all of health care--all health care plans to be government run. That is what we are starting to hear.
Of course, maybe government-run health care for all was the plan all along, but would you trust the Federal Government to run your health care plan after seeing how it is doing with ObamaCare? Then, of course, there is the administration's solution, what the New York Times calls ``a major push to enroll new participants in public marketplaces.''
Previous recent pushes have been of limited effectiveness. Enrollment in the exchanges currently stands at roughly 12 million, just over half of what was projected to be at this point in the law's implementation, but leaving that aside, the administration is unlikely to have a lot of success with a new enrollment push because it is abundantly clear it is pushing a broken program.
How does the administration think it is going to make high premiums, high deductibles, and limited choices look attractive to Americans? If I were the administration, I wouldn't hold out too much hope for an advertising campaign coming to the rescue. If we wanted to coin a phrase to describe the Obama Presidency, it might be the ``Presidency of diminished expectations.'' This, after all, is the Presidency in which Americans started to doubt the cornerstone of the American dream, something we all grew up with, that their children will have a better life than they do.
It is the Presidency in which we were asked to start looking at weak economic growth--as I mentioned, a little more than 1 percent in the last quarter and 1 percent in the quarter before that--weak economic growth as the new normal. This is good enough. Obviously, it is the Presidency in which we were asked to look at a future of high premiums and few choices as the new standard for health care.
I don't believe or think for a minute we need to resign ourselves to the diminished expectations of the Obama Presidency. We don't have to be stuck in the Obama economy for the long term, and ObamaCare doesn't have to be our health care future.
ObamaCare's goals of affordable, quality care were noble goals, but this law has utterly failed as a way of getting us there. We need to start over. We need to lift the burden ObamaCare has placed on American families. We need to replace this law with health care reform that will actually drive down costs and increase access to care. I have to say, Republicans have a lot of ideas to bring to the table, we are ready to start working on a new solution, and I hope Democrats and the new President will join us.
The American people have been stuck with ObamaCare for long enough. Zika Virus Funding
Mr. President, I wish to take a moment to talk about one other health care issue; that is, Federal funding to combat the Zika virus.
Democrats blocked $1.1 billion in Zika funding for the third time this week, despite the fact that every single Democrat in the Senate supported the exact same level of funding this spring. That is right. Every single Senate Democrat supported this exact level of funding this spring. Republicans were all ready to pass a final version of the bill and get this funding into the hands of the people fighting the virus, and then Senate Democrats changed their minds. They have offered a lot of different excuses. The Zika bill attacks women's health care, they claim, despite the fact that the bill actually increases women's access to care.
It threatens clean water protections, they say, despite the fact that the bill lifts just a handful of redundant regulations for a brief period of 180 days so mosquitoes can be sprayed--to kill the mosquitoes that are carrying the virus. They also claim to dislike the way the bill is paid for, despite the fact that the majority of the money used to fund the bill has been sitting around unused.
Either Democrats are so beholden to special interest groups that they cannot make decisions for themselves or they cannot take yes for an answer. The Zika funding bill provides expanded funding for community health centers, public health departments, and hospitals. The bill funds research into a Zika vaccine. It funds research into Zika treatments, and it streamlines mosquito control efforts, as the best way to protect people is to make sure they don't get bitten in the first place.
The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the lead government agency for fighting diseases, has said $1.1 billion--the exact amount we are talking about--will take care of immediate Zika needs.
So the question is, What are the Democrats waiting for? The number of Zika cases in the United States is rapidly increasing. More than 2,700 people within the continental United States are infected and many more in the territories. Democrats have talked and talked about the importance of addressing this crisis. Yet they just rejected their third opportunity to act.
How big does this problem have to get before Democrats decide to stop playing politics with the Zika funding? I hope they will act soon, work with us, and answer the calls and demands we are getting from the American people to provide a solution to this problem.
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