Executive Session
Floor Speech
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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, this week people in Virginia and Maryland are waking up to the first rate filings by private insurance companies in 2018. The numbers are simply stunning.
I am coming to the floor today to talk about what is going to be a very unhappy spring and summer for healthcare consumers all across the country, as health insurance companies--having now dealt with a full year and a half of President Trump's sabotage of the American healthcare system--are going to be looking at gigantic, unaffordable premium hikes for private healthcare insurance.
I wanted to come down today, as we are starting to get into these rate filings, as our constituents are starting to ask why they are facing premium increases of, in some cases, up to 90 percent--think about that. Think about getting a notice from your insurance company telling you that in 1 year, your premium is going to double. The cost of getting health insurance is going to double. I feel it is time to come down and talk about why this is happening, why you are seeing these radical rate hikes being proposed from insurance companies.
I want to walk through, for my colleagues, this very deliberate campaign of sabotage that this administration and congressional Republicans have waged against the Affordable Care Act and the American healthcare system writ large.
It starts on January 20. Within hours of being inaugurated, President Trump issues an Executive order in which he directs all of his Federal agencies to use their administrative powers to begin dismantling the Affordable Care Act ``to the maximum extent permitted by law.''
This is before there is any proposal for what should substitute for a piece of legislation that insured 20 million people who didn't have insurance before the Affordable Care Act. It was before we knew that replacement would, in fact, uninsure, not 20 million people but 30 million people and drive up rates by double digits.
On the first day, President Trump tells his agencies to start dismantling and attacking the Affordable Care Act. At this point, the Affordable Care Act is so wrapped into the healthcare system of this country that when attacking the Affordable Care Act, you are attacking the entirety of the healthcare system.
On January 26, 2017, the administration announces that it will stop advertising the open enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act. The administration says: We are no longer going to tell Americans that they have an option to become insured or to get less expensive coverage through the healthcare exchanges set up around the country or through the national exchange, leaving millions of Americans in the dark.
Next, the President starts to threaten insurance companies-- threatening to pull the subsidies that Congress approved allowing for premiums to be reduced for lower income beneficiaries. The Trump administration starts threatening to pull those cost-sharing reduction payments in April of 2017. Eventually, in October of last year, the administration follows through on that threat and ends payments to insurance companies to help reduce cost-sharing for beneficiaries, driving up the cost of insurance all across the country.
If you listen to health insurance executives talk to you about why they are passing on these big premium increases, they will tell you that one of the biggest reasons is the end of this program to help defray the costs for lower income individuals. Also, in 2017, about the same time he starts threatening to reduce these payments, the President cuts in half the open enrollment period. There is no reason to cut in half the open enrollment period other than you just don't want people to get insurance. It is a deliberate sabotage.
Cutting in half the enrollment period is simply a mechanism to try to deny people the ability to get healthcare. There is no practical or logistical benefit to reducing the amount of time people have to buy healthcare, just as there is no practical benefit to cutting off all the advertising for the healthcare exchanges other than you don't want people to sign up.
In July of 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services starts to unveil videos--23 of them in all--featuring individuals explaining how the Affordable Care Act has hurt the American healthcare system. They used their Twitter account to amplify these anti-ACA messages, and they removed any content promoting the exchanges from the website. Once again, it is just a spiteful attack on Americans who want to get health insurance and now will not know about it because of these attacks and removal of that content.
Open enrollment outreach funding was reduced in August of 2017 by as much as 90 percent. So the helpful people you used to have trying to figure out whether you qualified for Medicaid or whether you qualified for a subsidy or a tax credit are no longer available because that money was taken away.
Then there was the big legislative intervention, the repeal of the individual mandate. The individual mandate was repealed as part of the tax bill, even though CBO told Congress: If you do that, 13 million people will lose insurance. With full knowledge that the repeal of the mandate would result in 13 million Americans losing their health insurance, Congress went forward with it. CBO also said it will result in double-digit premium increases. Congress was told, if you take this step, 13 million will lose coverage, and premiums will go up. Congress still moved forward with it, and it was passed as part of the tax bill, with no Democratic votes.
Finally, the President most recently unveiled what he called the short-term health insurance plan rule. These are more commonly referred to as junk plans. These are plans that last up to a year but don't need to comply with Federal regulations; for instance, regulations that require insurance companies to actually give you coverage for things like mental illness or maternity care or regulations that require insurance companies to protect people with preexisting conditions. All of those superpopular benefits in the Affordable Care Act--the ones the Republicans were so nervous to remove--are now no longer available to many Americans. Because of this short-term plan rule, these junk plans are going to be much more widely available.
So you have this very coordinated, very deliberate attack on the American healthcare system: the Executive order in January of 2017, directing all Federal agencies to start undermining the American healthcare system; in April of 2017, the cut in the open enrollment period; in May, the votes start happening on the floor of the Senate to take insurance away from 23 million people--one of the bills took away insurance from 30 million people; in December, the repeal of the individual mandate, resulting in premiums going up by double digits; and now this junk plan rule, taking away protections from millions of Americans. The effect of that junk plan rule is also to move healthier patients out of the exchange pools into the junk plans because the junk plans don't have to cover anything, so healthy people will go to those plans, which drives up rates for the plans that people with any kind of preexisting condition would be able to access.
You have this very deliberate plan to try to undermine the American healthcare system, and we are now seeing the consequences. As I mentioned, the period of rate filings is beginning across the country, where insurance companies have to announce what their rate increases are going to be.
Healthcare inflation, on an annual basis, has been holding steady over the years. It certainly never gets above 10 percent, and for a number of years during the early rollout of the Affordable Care Act, that number was at or lower than 5 percent. So if you are just looking at the amount we are spending on an annual basis above last year on healthcare, that number has not recently been more than 5 percent. Yet one insurer in Virginia--a subsidiary of the big health insurance company, CareFirst--is proposing a 64-percent increase in Virginia. Other rate increase requests in Virginia are 26 percent and 15 percent. Nobody can afford a 64-percent increase in health insurance premiums in Virginia, but it is a consequence of this deliberate campaign of sabotage.
Let's take a look at Maryland. There is one insurance company in Maryland that is asking for a 91-percent increase in premiums--again, this is a CareFirst plan--for its broad network PPO plan that currently has about 13,000 people in it. Thirteen thousand people in Maryland potentially are going to get a 91-percent increase in their health insurance premiums because of this deliberate campaign of sabotage.
If you are in other CareFirst plans in Maryland, you are getting a 19-percent increase. Your premiums are going up by one-fifth in one single year, in large part, because of this deliberate campaign to undermine the Affordable Care Act because of actions this Congress has taken that would knowingly increase rates for healthcare consumers.
My colleagues and I are going to come down to the floor of the Senate, over the course of the spring and summer, to make sure everyone here and every one out there in America understands what the consequences of this American healthcare sabotage campaign is. It starts in Maryland with rate increases that get as big as 91 percent, and in Virginia, where health insurance increases get as big as 64 percent. These numbers will continue to roll out all across the country, and Americans are going to be stunned--stunned--at how much this Republican campaign sabotage is costing them.
I will just add one last note, which, to many of my constituents in Connecticut, feels like insult to injury. The tax bill did drive up rates by 10 percent, at least, in the first year. A big chunk of these increases, more than 10 percent, is a result of the repeal of the individual mandate, but the tax bill also gave a windfall to insurance companies and drug companies--some of the biggest players in the healthcare space.
I just totaled up the projected 2018 tax savings to eight of the biggest insurance companies in the country, and it is over $4 billion. At the same time that these companies are passing along rate increases of 64 percent or 90 percent, they are getting billions of dollars in tax savings from this Congress. It appears none of the tax breaks this Congress bestowed on the insurance industry is going to consumers.
When you look at the drug industry, where we have a little bit more mature information, you know why. One report, I believe released by the Finance Committee, showed that pharmaceutical companies already have announced $50--50--billion in stock buybacks and share buybacks as a result of the tax bill. These drug companies aren't announcing price cuts to insurance companies; these drug companies are not announcing price cuts for consumers; these drug companies are announcing massive share and stock buybacks that will largely benefit the millionaire and billionaire investors in those drug companies. This is insult to injury for the people in my State and people all across the country because they are watching their healthcare insurance premiums skyrocket, while the windfall of the tax bill accrues to the owners of the insurance companies and the drug companies.
What a great time to be in the healthcare business today. You get a giant tax break, and you get to pass along gigantic premium increases to consumers all across this country.
Think about it. Somebody in Maryland, making $30,000, $40,000 a year and being told the insurance company he does business with is going to get $1 billion in new tax relief from this Congress, and he is going to get a 91-percent increase in his premium. That is outrageous. That is outrageous, and yet it is just going to get worse.
As this spring and summer plays out--I think every single week there is a new State or set of States unveiling rate filings--I will come down and update this chart so everybody knows what the numbers are. It starts with rate increases as high--and I am not saying every single increase is this high, but in Virginia it is 64 percent, and in Maryland it is 91 percent. I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of very big numbers on this board, and I want to make sure everybody understands that if you want to know why premiums are going up at the rate they are, you don't have to look any further than this campaign of healthcare sabotage that has been waged by the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress.
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