National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I would also like to rise to talk about this important issue of healthcare.

I have heard my colleagues, Senator Murphy, Senator Merkley, and Senator Wyden, and I know Senator Murray will speak in a minute. We are focusing on the great damage this administration is doing to the healthcare of Americans.

I thought maybe I could inject just a little bit of good news into this discussion. The good news I want to describe is positive advances that are still taking place because of the Affordable Care Act, despite the best efforts of the administration to kill the Affordable Care Act.

Because Senate colleagues joined together on the floor nearly a year ago to defeat efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, even as the sabotage has been going on, there has been an advance in my State that is very significant. Two weeks ago, my State legislature, after a 4- year debate, decided to become the 33rd State to accept Medicaid expansion.

Mr. President and my colleagues, if you want to know whether what you do in this Chamber matters, that vote in August of last year that preserved the Affordable Care Act enabled my State to embrace Medicaid expansion, and in one stroke of one vote, 400,000 Virginians have the ability now to have healthcare maybe for the first time in their lives. That is nearly 5 percent of our population.

These are working-age adults, most of them--many of them--working multiple jobs, but they have not been able to afford health insurance. But because this body saved the Affordable Care Act, we were able to, in the stroke of a vote, provide health insurance to 400,000 people-- people who now know they can be taken care of if they get injured or if they are in an accident. Even if they are completely healthy, they have peace of mind and don't go to bed at night with the anxiety of what is going to happen to my family if I am in an accident or what will happen to my wife if she gets ill.

The Affordable Care Act is not just holding in the face of this sabotage effort by the Trump administration; it is actually still advancing in places like Virginia. A number of other States have referenda on the ballot to do exactly what Virginia just did. We do not need to stand still; we need to defeat sabotage, and then we need to move ahead.

My colleagues have stressed the various ways in which the Trump administration has tried to undermine the healthcare of Americans, and I don't need to go over them at length: limiting enrollment periods, limiting marketing, eliminating the individual mandate, and injecting uncertainty over the payment of cost-sharing. All of those things are leading insurance companies to increase rates. When they announced rate increases in my State recently, some insurance companies want to increase rates by as much as 64 percent.

The good news is--at least if there is any good news--they are not being shy about explaining the reason. They are telling us exactly the reason they are increasing the rates. They are increasing rates because of specific, identified policies of this administration to punish Americans and raise their health insurance costs. That is what the insurance companies are stating.

As Senator Wyden mentioned, now Republicans are in court with the administration to try to defeat the protection the Affordable Care Act gave to people with preexisting conditions. These are not just a few people in my State or nationally; these are tens of millions of Americans, Virginians who have cancer, diabetes, or even lesser conditions that in the past--and potentially in a Trump administration future--could get kicked to the curb as a result.

I want to tell my colleagues one story about preexisting conditions because it is my family's story. Then I will conclude because I want my Senate colleague from Washington, who has been a leader on this effort, to offer her perspective.

When we think about preexisting conditions, there are all kinds of them, but some people don't know how broadly this definition has been used by insurance companies to basically deny anybody coverage if they can think of a single reason or a simple reason to do so.

I am not going to get into my own family's medical history, but I just want to tell you this. My wife and I have three children. There are five of us. I would submit that we have to be virtually the healthiest family in the United States because the only hospitalizations for the five of us in our lives, as a family of five, have been three childbirths, with my wife being in the hospital three times to deliver healthy children.

Right after the Affordable Care Act passed, when the ban on discriminating against someone with preexisting conditions was going into effect, for the first time, neither my wife nor I had a job with an employer that was offering a group plan so we needed to try to buy insurance on the individual market. My wife is a super diligent consumer and made numerous calls, and two insurance companies turned us down because of preexisting conditions. One was a preexisting condition of mine, though not serious enough ever to put me in a hospital, and one was because of a preexisting condition of one of my kids, also not sufficient to put that youngster in a hospital.

In both instances, the insurance company said: Well, we will write a policy for some of your family, but we will not write it for all of your family.

Safety tip: Do not tell my wife you will write an insurance policy but not for one of her three kids. That is not a good thing to do.

When my wife heard that, she said: I want to know whom I am speaking to because what you are suggesting to me is against the law.

No, it is not against the law. It is company policy. We can turn your child down, Ms. Holton. We can turn your child down.

No, you can't. Put a supervisor on the line.

The supervisor got on the line.

My wife said: This is now against the law. You cannot turn my child down because of a preexisting condition.

After some ``backing-and-forthing'' and the ruffling of pages, I guess, in an insert in the employee manual, the employee said: You are right. We can't turn you down. We apologize. That policy that we told you could be for four can now be for five.

If this can happened to a family like mine who had never even had a hospitalization for any illness or injury, other than delivering a child--this was happening over and over again--why would this administration want to return to those days? It is shocking and heartless, and we are going to do everything we can in the court and in Congress, as well as together in dialogue with the public, to make sure this important protection is not ripped out of the hands of American families.

Congress needs to act to stop the Trump administration sabotage, to preserve the Affordable Care Act. I hope we will take up the Murray- Alexander bill. It will stabilize the insurance market through provision of reinsurance, through guarantee of cost-sharing payments. There is no reason we can't take this up. Then we need to move ahead even further on proposals like the bill I have with Senator Bennet, the Medicare-X bill, to make sure every person in this country can buy a Medicare policy, a policy developed by Medicare on the individual insurance exchange, if they choose.

I am glad to be joined together with colleagues who are so passionate about protecting the healthcare of American families. Based on the results in Virginia, which avoided Medicare expansion for years only to finally wake up and realize we need to do it, I know we will prevail in this effort because it is what the American public wants us to do.

Mr. President, I would love to yield the floor to my colleague from Washington.

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