National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018--motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. President, I am not sure exactly what those words mean, but I know it allows me to speak so I am glad to have done it.

I thank you for your leadership on the natural disasters we are having, particularly in Puerto Rico. There are 3.4 million American citizens who are living in conditions that nobody in this country should have to tolerate. They are without fuel, they are without food, they are without water, they are without energy, and they are without electricity. Some reports have said it is going to be months before that electricity is repaired. We have to do everything we can in this body to make sure these American citizens are supported and that they can rebuild, and I know the Presiding Officer feels the same way. We have to work together to do this.

Mr. President, that is not the reason I am coming to the floor today.

I wanted to say a word about healthcare now that the decision has been made, apparently, to not even have a vote on this latest version of the repeal and replace bill. This was going to be, I think, the fourth time we had a vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The House of Representatives, over the last 7 years, has voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act somewhere on the order of 67 times or almost 70 times. They have gone back to their constituents year after year after year saying they voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act; that it was a Socialist takeover of the United States of America that they were trying to correct. They distorted what the Affordable Care Act actually was. I am not going to litigate that today.

It is clear, from my perspective in Colorado, whether people support the Affordable Care Act or whether they don't, it often turns on--not always--what party they are in or whether they supported President Obama or whether they didn't. I say not always because I get a lot of email and have people in my townhalls who aren't Democrats but who have preexisting conditions or whose children have preexisting conditions who have health insurance for the first time as a result of the Affordable Care Act.

Having said all that, whether they support the Affordable Care Act or whether they don't, in my State--and I bet it is true all over the United States of America--people are deeply dissatisfied with the way they interact and their families interact and their small businesses interact with the American healthcare system. They should be because it doesn't work very well. I am not talking about the Affordable Care Act.

I am talking about the Affordable Care Act, plus our healthcare system. They are not the same thing, and we should be addressing that.

We should be addressing the costs in our system. We should be addressing the lack of transparency in our system. We should be making sure people in the richest country in the world have access to health insurance, but they also have to have access to quality care. In too many rural areas in Colorado--and it is true all over America--there are not enough primary care doctors, not enough primary care nurses. We are not delivering healthcare in those places very efficiently, and we are not delivering it well enough, especially when we know a lot of our veterans live in those communities, and we know increasingly there is a profound opioid addiction that needs to be dealt with.

After 7 years of saying repeal, repeal, repeal and then some years of saying repeal and replace, we have now wasted 7 months of the American people's time on an entirely partisan effort to try to pass two bills that could not have been more unresponsive to the critics of ObamaCare in Colorado, to say nothing of the supporters. So it is not a surprise to me that the last attempt failed, and it is not a surprise to me that people weren't even going to vote on this bill because it is such a terrible bill that they didn't want to vote on it. So they have withdrawn it, which is good for the American people, except the people in Colorado are still facing challenges in healthcare, including challenges from the Affordable Care Act. There, I said it. I voted for it.

There are things we should fix, and one of those things is a problem that is common--I heard both Members of the Republican Party on the Finance Committee and Democrats on the Finance Committee yesterday at the hearing talk about it--which is the problem that people have in the individual market affording insurance. They say to me, as somebody who voted for the Affordable Care Act: Hey, Michael. You have required us to buy something--insurance because of the individual mandate--that in my area is too expensive because there is not enough competition of insurers, and the deductible is so high it is of no use to me and my family. Why would you make me buy something like that? I think that is a completely legitimate criticism of the bill. It is important to recognize that when we are talking about this group of people who are very important, it is 7 percent of the population that is covered in America--7 percent. Ninety three percent of the people are getting their insurance someplace else--from their employer, from Medicare, from Medicaid. This is 7 percent we are talking about.

By the way, the issue around that 7 percent--not the people--the issue around that 7 percent, that is what has consumed our politics for the last 7 years. It is not how to make it less expensive for 100 percent of the American people, not how to make it more transparent for 100 percent of the American people, more predictable for 100 percent of the American people but what are we going to do to cover 7 percent. Of those, the folks who aren't getting subsidies, are about 1 percent of people who are insured in America. I say that not to diminish those people at all because they are struggling--and I meet them all the time in my State--I say it to show just how small that set of issues is and how easily they could be resolved by the U.S. Congress if we could work together instead of having this pitched battle about healthcare, instead of calling each other names and Bolshevik takeover and all the rest.

Fortunately, there is a solution that is being worked on not in the Finance Committee but in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. The two leaders of that committee--Lamar Alexander, who is the Republican chair, and Patty Murray, who is the Democratic ranking member, are among two of the finest legislators in this body. Time after time after time, even when Washington has not worked, they have managed to lead that committee to what Lamar Alexander refers to as a result. It has come to the floor after going through a process in our committee, an amendment process. It has come to the floor for an amendment process, whether we were reforming the FDA or rewriting the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which used to be known as No Child Left Behind. That bill actually got a unanimous vote in our committee--a committee that has on it Bernie Sanders from Vermont and Rand Paul from Kentucky. That is quite an achievement.

So I have absolute confidence in their ability to deal with this set of issues related to this 7 percent of our population. And I hope that bipartisan process will then become a model or a foundation for the work we need to do on healthcare going forward. We have to turn the page on the last 7 years or 8 years of these repeal votes.

From my perspective, having failed to repeal, the answer can't be to say: We will not help you fix the Affordable Care Act because if we participate in the process to fix the Affordable Care Act, it somehow legitimizes the Affordable Care Act.

You should not hold the position that if you fail to repeal, you can't fix it. If you are going to repeal it, repeal it. And I think we know where that has gone. If you are not going to repeal it, you better be part of fixing it, or you are going to own the problem.

There are a lot of people on this side who want to address that issue, and I believe there are a lot of Republicans who want to address that issue. We are now out of excuses for why we can't do it because Graham-Cassidy has been pulled, as it should have been because that bill, far from stabilizing our insurance system, would have actually made it worse, would have injected even more volatility.

Sometimes people say: Well, don't you think there is already volatility in the system? My answer to that is yes, I do. That is why we have to fix it. The last thing we need to do is make it more volatile. The last thing we need to do is make matters worse. We should stabilize it, based on the bipartisan testimony we have had in the HELP Committee.

The other thing it does--and the Senator from Minnesota is here, so I am going to stop--the other thing it does is it throws millions of people off of insurance. This is not a healthcare bill. It is not a healthcare bill; it is ``we are going to take your healthcare away'' bill. It couldn't be sustained in front of the American people. They wouldn't even vote on it because they knew how bad it was. We had no hearings before yesterday's Finance Committee. It is like watching ``Veep.'' It is not the way the government ought to work. So they have an excuse for a hearing. They decide to have the hearing. The Congressional Budget Office report, which we should have had months to look at, if not weeks, comes out in the middle of the hearing and tells us that millions of people are going to lose their health insurance as a result of this bill--flying completely in the face of President Trump's promises.

Let's get this short-term thing done, let's stabilize the individual market, which we need to do, and then let's address healthcare in a bipartisan way, and I will accept President Trump's goals for what it should look like. Let's make sure everybody is covered at a lower price, with higher quality. That is what he promised on the campaign trail, and we have the opportunity to deliver that if we are willing to work in a bipartisan way.
I know that is what people in Colorado want out of this place. They are so tired of the Affordable Care Act being litigated in this way, and it is clear that the repeal effort has failed. But that is not enough. We have to continue to fix the system. And I wish Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray all the best as we try to do this in the HELP Committee, and then I hope Democrats and Republicans will support that effort on this floor, and we can actually do something useful, after all of these years, for the American people and their families and their small businesses.

With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

I want to observe--I don't know how to phrase this question, but the Senator from Minnesota made such an excellent point about dropping this on the States. I hadn't made that point. That was one of the things that came up over and over again in the Finance Committee hearing, was that in the name of federalism, we were basically imposing on all of the States the obligation to decide that they had to reinvent their healthcare system over the next 2 years whether that was something they wanted to do or not. I am glad the Senator raised that. I also want to thank her for her leadership.

I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source