National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, I think it is clear to people all across America that the U.S. healthcare system needs reform. Premiums for health insurance are going up by double digits across the country.

People living in almost half of the country only have one company selling ObamaCare plans. Millions of people are struggling. They are struggling to get coverage they can afford so they can get the care they need. I will state that it is all because of the healthcare law that the Democrats wrote and passed in Congress and inflicted upon the American people, which raised the costs for people all across the country and limited their choices.

Today the Senator from Vermont, Mr. Sanders, and other Democrats said they want to take this failing healthcare system even further. They call their plan ``Medicare for all.'' Don't be fooled. They want to take a plan that has government much more involved in the healthcare of the American people and go much further. I don't believe it is actually a serious plan to help fix the challenges we are facing in this country, but it is now the new litmus test for the liberal left. If this idea were ever to become law, it would mean worse care and it would be outrageously expensive.
The plan the Democrats are talking about would amount to complete Washington control over the healthcare of every man, woman, and child in America, and taxpayers would have to pick up the tab.

Supporters of putting the Federal Government in Washington, DC, in charge of personal healthcare decisions like to claim that this is the way that other countries do it as well. They like to cite as an example the United Kingdom. Well, a lot of people in the United Kingdom see their system of nationalized healthcare entering a death spiral, and it looks a lot like what has happened to ObamaCare.

The waiting lines in England have recently gotten a lot longer for people waiting to get care. They are actually setting new records for how long you have to wait in line to get care in England. For emergency care, they have more people waiting in line in the emergency room for 12 hours or longer. Those numbers have gone up--12 hours or longer--and it has gotten worse.

Let's say you have a chronic condition, a long-term medical condition. To start treatment for long-term medical conditions, the number of people having to wait 18 weeks or longer has gone up. If Democrats get their way, the American people will have the same kinds of delays. It is inevitable. The problem isn't just the delays. If Washington pays all of the bills, Washington will want much tighter control over care.

The Democrats' new scheme will come with a much more powerful rationing board. You can see it coming. In England, the rationing of healthcare means that certain medications are not allowed. There are limits on things like knee and hip operations. The same thing is true in Canada. Medical boards in some parts of the country have banned surgeries for people who are obese or who are smokers. How do you think that would work in the United States? Close to 40 percent of Americans are now considered obese. Would they all be blocked from getting operations that would help improve their health and quality of life? It is only if the rationing board were to say so.

The British have to ration healthcare partly because of the enormous cost of so-called free medical care. They also have a shortage of people who actually provide the care. Since 2016, there has been a net loss of more than 5,000 nurses and midwives across the British healthcare system. More than a quarter of the nurses who quit cited disillusionment over the quality of care provided to patients. Nurses are quitting because of the poor quality of care provided to patients. It is a great concern.

The United Kingdom ranks 20th out of 24th among Western countries for breast cancer survival. For survival, the United States is first. If you are a woman with breast cancer or a man with prostate cancer, your chances of survival and successful treatment are much, much greater in the United States than they are in Great Britain. It is not that the doctors in this country are that much smarter. It is that people get care sooner. There are not all these long waiting lines. But that will happen if the plan endorsed by 15 Democrats in the Senate and the majority of the Democrats in the House were to ever become law.

Let's talk about stroke. For the most common kind of stroke, the United Kingdom is 25th out of 30 countries in terms of recovery, solutions, and success. The United States is fourth. Of course, all of what the Democrats are proposing will not come cheap. Democrats in California had their own scheme earlier this year.

When the group that looks at what the cost is going to be reviewed it-- and I was in the State senate in Wyoming, and in any key piece of legislation, we would have to do a fiscal note, which is what it is going to cost--in California what they proposed would cost about $400 billion a year. So how much does the entire State of California pay to run the whole State over the course of a year? What is their budget for the year? It is less than half that amount. So what they are proposing on healthcare is double what they pay for everything that the State of California does.

Last year, Senator Sanders gave a rough sketch of his plan as part of his Presidential campaign. It would have raised Washington's total healthcare expenditures by $32 trillion over just the first 10 years.

To pay for it, he wanted to raise taxes, including higher payroll taxes on workers. The problem was that all of these new taxes would pay for less than half of the government's new spending. The legislation written and cosponsored by Democrats in the House says that it would be paid for by things like--and this is in their words--``a modest tax on unearned income'' and a ``small tax on stock and bond transactions.'' Remember how President Obama promised that his healthcare law wouldn't raise taxes on middle-class families--in his words--by a single dime? It turns out that the law included dozens of taxes on American working families, certainly including middle-class Americans all across the country.

Democrats say that total Washington control over healthcare would make things so efficient, that it would save a whole lot of money. Does anyone believe that is ever going to happen? A lot of people have the stress of dealing between their doctor and their insurance company, and there are a lot of problems out there.
Nothing in the Democrats' takeover of healthcare changes any of that.

It just means that the people will be caught in the middle between a fight with their government and a bunch of unaccountable bureaucrats in Washington, DC. How is that better? Where will we see savings from that? The Democrats have no real answers, just empty promises.

You can tell that it is not a real plan because when Democrats had a chance to actually vote on this idea in the Senate, they took a pass. In July, the Senate voted on a bill written by House Democrats. We brought it to the floor of the Senate during the healthcare debate and put it up for a vote. As to the bill that half of the Democrats in the House had cosponsored, they said: Let's give the Senators an opportunity. Every Republican voted against it, and 43 Democrats voted present. Democrats had a chance to stand up and vote for the idea that they love to talk about, but not a single Senator voted for it, including Senator Sanders.

Now some of us suspected that this was where the debate over ObamaCare was headed all along. The healthcare law, as passed years ago, was so obviously flawed that there was no way it would work the way the Democrats promised. You had to wonder if Democrats actually wanted it to fail so they could push for more Washington control, more government control over your healthcare.

You can call it the old Potomac two-step. When we were debating ObamaCare in 2009, Senator Sanders came to the floor of the Senate and said that a full Washington takeover of healthcare was the way to go.
Today he is taking his shot. The ObamaCare markets are in shambles.

There is no denying that ObamaCare failed to keep its promises. The American people are paying a very steep price for the failures of the law. The promises that Democrats are making about their new healthcare scheme are even more outlandish. When it fails, the damage will be catastrophic. We cannot allow that to happen to the American people.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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