National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I thank my colleague for letting us come down to talk about the trumped-up healthcare prices in America. It is trumped up because the prices are going up specifically because of the policies of President Trump and his team. The sabotage is at full speed.

Long before the sabotage occurred, in 2017, here on the floor of the Senate, we had five different versions of trying to wipe out healthcare for American citizens. They varied in range from wiping out healthcare for 22 million Americans to wiping out healthcare for 30 million Americans.

How is it that in a ``we the people'' republic, people can come down here and vote to wipe out healthcare for millions of people across this country? Quite simply, we have a team in power that believes in government by and for the powerful and the rich. They have healthcare, so they don't care about the rest of us, but we should be here fighting for the ordinary citizen in America. What is more important to peace of mind than the knowledge that if your loved one gets sick or injured, they will get the healthcare they need and you will not go bankrupt in the process? That is why this is so important to Americans.

Just by a little bit, just by a thin, one-vote margin, we defeated those efforts to destroy healthcare last year, in 2017. We thought, thank goodness the people have triumphed for once in this Chamber. But no sooner than that occurred, then we had a tax bill--a tax bill that itself was written by and for the wealthy and well connected rather than the people. It borrows $1.5 trillion and gives most of it to the wealthiest of Americans.

Embedded in that terrible assault on the finances of America, that terrible failure to address the fundamentals of things that enable families to thrive--healthcare, education, living-wage jobs, and good housing--embedded in that was pulling the plug on the insurance pools. What does that mean? It means that the healthiest can jump out of the pool, and when they do that, they leave sicker people, and the price goes up. The price goes up, so more of the healthy people jump out of the pool, and the price goes up. This is known as the insurance death spiral. For ordinary citizens, it is known as double-digit increases in the cost of your healthcare policies brought by these Republicans and Donald Trump with this deliberate effort of sabotage.

The sabotage didn't end with pulling the plug on the insurance pools, no. Then we had the effort to undermine the marketplace, where people can compare policies and get policies that abide by the healthcare bill of rights, the Patients' Bill of Rights, things like, yes, you can buy a policy at the same price as everyone else even if you have preexisting conditions--that healthcare bill of rights. It is the healthcare bill of rights that allows testing and screening because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

What is Team Trump doing? Well, they cut the enrollment period in half. They cut funding for outreach by up to 92 percent. They slashed the budget for advertising--so people wouldn't know that there was an open period and would miss the opportunity to get a healthcare plan--by 90 percent, 9 out of 10 dollars. They put up anti-marketplace propaganda. They periodically proceeded to shut down the website so people would get frustrated while trying to sign up for insurance. That is a real winner--make it hard for people to sign up for healthcare. Just how bad does it have to get--this attack on ordinary Americans by this administration, making it difficult, sometimes impossible, for people to sign up for hours at a time, right in the middle of an open enrollment period. They are wiping out the cost-sharing subsidies, so healthcare will be more expensive for people who have the least means.

Then we have even more. We have the junk policies--these junk insurance policies that make you feel good, they are very cheap, you can buy them, and they are good for filling your filing cabinet, but when it comes to actually getting healthcare when you are sick or injured, they don't pay for anything. That is a junk policy. It is really a predatory policy to try to say to people: Here, buy this, and you have insurance--but you don't really, not when you need it. That really is another assault on an ordinary American about the peace of mind of having healthcare when you are injured or when you are sick.

So there we are. We thought this assault had gone as far as it could possibly go.

Someday the people in this country will rise up in an election and proceed to say: We really do believe in that vision of our Constitution, that ``we the people'' vision of our Constitution of the United States of America; we believe in that vision, and we want an elected body that believes in that vision.

But a new assault came just days ago in which the President--who promised to make sure that every healthcare policy was cheaper than it was before, and that turned out to be a lie; the one who said that every person will be covered, and that turned out to be a lie; the one who said that whatever happens, I will absolutely make sure we continue to protect Americans who have preexisting conditions, and they will get the same or better treatment than they have now--issues an order that says: We are not going to defend the requirement that people with preexisting conditions can get healthcare at the same price as everyone else. What is this called? This is called a sellout. This is called a deception. This is called a whopper. This is called an assault on ordinary Americans when it comes to healthcare.

This is why insurance rates are going up all over the country. We are seeing double-digit increases in every State, even my State, which tried to protect ordinary people by wiping out and barring those junk plans but was assaulted by the rest of the sabotage. This isn't limited just to Connecticut and my State of Oregon; it is State after State after State, including the State of Virginia.

Before my colleague from Virginia speaks, I yield to my colleague from Oregon, the senior Senator from Oregon, who knows this issue so well and who has been in this Chamber fighting for peace of mind in healthcare for year after year after year. This is why we must come together as a nation and repair our healthcare system to have a simple, seamless healthcare system that does right.

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