National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I don't want to make this a cake-tossing contest, but I also want it understood that my colleague from Oregon has done an invaluable service to the country by showing the importance of what is happening at the border, where there is an effort in effect to traumatize children and separate kids from their parents. I look forward to working with my colleague when we do some work on it in Oregon. I certainly don't want to hold up my friend from Virginia, and I appreciate Senator Murphy.

Before I came to the Congress, I was codirector of the Oregon Gray Panthers, a senior citizens group, for about 7 years. Back then, we were talking about ways in which to move forward on healthcare, to advance the rights of our people, to improve the quality of life in this country. There was often a bipartisan coalition to do that, to make those advancements.

In the last year, however, there has been an unprecedented effort to turn back the healthcare clock. We see it with the effort to sell junk insurance, which, in effect, involves the Trump Health and Human Services Department saying to States: Well, it is really pretty much OK to discriminate; just don't be too obvious about it. Then we saw the effort to strip away the Medicaid guarantee of nursing home coverage for older people.

Now, Senator Murphy, Senator Kaine, and my colleagues are here on the floor to talk about the Trump administration's efforts to unravel the current law that bars insurance companies from beating the stuffing out of people with preexisting conditions. That is the way it used to be, folks. If you had a preexisting condition and you weren't healthy or wealthy--and that is what you face if you have a preexisting condition--you were really in bad shape. If you are healthy, you pay your bills--and you don't have bills. If you are wealthy, you pay the bills. But millions who have preexisting conditions would just get clobbered with premium hikes, so they couldn't get coverage at all.

Finally, we said in the Affordable Care Act: We are actually going to start moving the clock forward, and we are going to bar insurance companies from discriminating against those with preexisting conditions. This is particularly important for the 67 million women under 65, an enormous number of women in this country who have a preexisting condition, and they have, over the last few years, counted on the healthcare protections I just described in the Affordable Care Act as a healthcare safety net, as a backstop--protections that say they can't be charged more because they need maternity care and other essential services, protections that say they can't be denied coverage due to a preexisting condition, and that means everything from ovarian cancer to asthma. Every year, those who switch jobs or stop working, perhaps to take care of a loved one--and women often perform those roles--now have the assurance that they can have the mobility of being able to move up in the workforce if they live in Virginia or Connecticut or Oregon and they see the opportunity to get a better job. If they have a preexisting condition, without these protections, they are locked in. They are locked into the workforce. What we are saying is that we want these protections to stay so that women and all Americans have the opportunity to secure advancements when they have the skills and talents to move on to another job.

These fundamental healthcare rights will disappear if the President and the Republican State attorneys general are able to unravel the law of the land.

This is really a head-scratcher, folks. It is one thing for an administration to say to Senator Kaine or to Senator Murphy that they want to come to the Congress, they want to come to the appropriate committees--my colleagues serve on one of them, and I serve on the other--and say: We want to pass a law that changes preexisting condition policy. We wouldn't be for it, but at least that is a legitimate debate. They are not talking about doing that. They are not talking about coming to Congress.

Do you know why they are not coming to the Congress? Because they know their effort to unravel preexisting condition policy would not have a pulse up here. They wouldn't be able to get any traction for it. So what they are doing is going through the back door. They are trying to use a very complicated legal process--and it is going to be very hard to follow--about the Supreme Court and the purchase requirements and the tax and the like. But make no mistake about it, this is an effort to unravel the law of the land to deny protections to women-- protections that ensure that if they have a preexisting condition, they don't have to go to bed at night in pure panic, worried that they could wake up in the morning and they could lose everything.

I will have plenty more to say about it. This is especially important because it escalates the Trump administration's campaign of healthcare discrimination against American women. This is really going to take a toll on 67 million women under 65--people who, as I have said, without this protection are going to go to bed at night, in my view, with an enormous fear and an enormous sense of uncertainty of what is ahead, where they could lose everything.

With that, I thank my colleagues for their courtesy and Senator Murphy for bringing these efforts to the floor so frequently.

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