Interior, Environment, Financial Services, and General Government Appropriations Act, 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. KING. Madam President, I wish to commend the Senator from Indiana for bringing our attention to this important subject. It is important in all of our States. Career technical education is an incredibly important part of helping to grow our economy, so I wish to express my appreciation to the Senator from Indiana for his leadership on this issue. Healthcare

Madam President, I rise to speak about a different issue; that is, healthcare and what is happening to the Affordable Care Act and to the availability of healthcare and health insurance in our society.

I rise genuinely puzzled about what appears to be an obsession or a mania with removing health insurance from people, with keeping people from having health insurance. I just don't get it.

The data is very clear over the years that having health insurance saves lives. There can be debate about exactly how many, but the reality is--and it is perfectly logical--if you have health insurance, you are more likely to be treated, you are more likely to be treated earlier, and you are more likely to survive, particularly with regard to diseases like cancer, where early detection and treatment is the best defense against this dread disease.

I just don't understand why we cannot face the reality that health insurance or health coverage or access to healthcare is a fundamental right. It is a fundamental part of being a human. The idea of rationing healthcare by wealth just doesn't make sense, particularly in a country committed, as we are, to equality and equal justice under law.

The other reason I am surprised at this continuing effort to undermine the Affordable Care Act is that its eventual sabotage will only lead to greater demands for some kind of more intrusive change to our healthcare system--a single-payer system or healthcare for all. There are already millions of people in this country building a political movement to support Medicare for all, which is essentially a single-payer system. So those who are trying to cripple the Affordable Care Act, which really was a conservative proposal from the 1980s and 1990s, are only paving the way for a much more radical transformation of our healthcare system than they would ever desire.

The ACA simply builds upon the current system we have of private health insurance and provides health insurance to those who aren't fortunate enough to work for a company that provides a subsidy for health insurance or provides health insurance to its employees. That is all it is. It is really an effort to fill the gap in this country between those who have insurance through their employer or through Medicare or through Medicaid and those who have no insurance.

The ACA was a remarkable success for a period of years because it vastly cut the number of uninsured people in this country. So why we are trying to kill it, to strangle it, to mug it, to sabotage it just doesn't make sense from any point of view--either from the point of view of providing healthcare and health insurance to people, which saves lives, or the point of view of trying to maintain the semblance of the current system.

So here we are in the midst of an ongoing attempt to basically sabotage this system. Back in October of 2017, the administration said they are no longer going to make cost-sharing reduction payments to help insurance companies provide lower copays and deductibles to low- income individuals. Premium increases. I sat on this floor and listened to Members decry premium increases because of the Affordable Care Act. This is an action which is sure to provide premium increases, and it was a voluntary action of the administration taken last fall.

Back in January of 2017, within weeks of taking office, one of the first things the new administration did was cut advertising to notify people of the availability of reasonably priced insurance under the Affordable Care Act--an initial step to cut access.

Of course, leading up to the tax filing deadline in 2016, for 2016 returns back last year, the administration said the IRS was no longer going to enforce the individual mandate.

Then, of course, this body, in a provision which I can only deem as cruel because of the effect on insurance premiums and the effect on the insurance market, generally, eliminated the individual mandate as part of the tax bill last December.

In 2018, the open enrollment period was reduced from 12 weeks to 6-- cut in half. No reason was given. Let's cut it in half so fewer people can sign up. Interestingly, almost the same number of people signed up because they realized how important this is.

Then, last winter, during the open enrollment season, HHS, on Sundays, shut down the website where people can sign up, ostensibly for maintenance. It happened to be the 12 hours on a Sunday when most people would have an opportunity to navigate the website.

Speaking of navigation, in, I think, what is one of the most blatant attempts to sabotage and undermine people's ability to gain this most basic and important health insurance--to provide them with healthy lives--CMS recently announced they are cutting grant funding for navigators, the people who help people get the coverage. They cut it dramatically. It has gone from $62.5 million to $36 million, to $10 million.

This is complicated stuff. I have gone on the website myself in order to get my coverage. As the Presiding Officer knows, we are in the Affordable Care Act. We have to go on the website. We have to get our care through it. If you have done it, you know it is hard. It is complicated. You are comparing policies. You are comparing deductibles. You are comparing premiums. It is a difficult, complicated process. The navigators I know in Maine have been enormously helpful in just guiding people through the process so they don't give up, and they end up getting healthcare and health insurance for the first time in their lives. The amount of funding available in Maine has been reduced from $550,000 to $100,000. It was cut by 80 percent. This is just arbitrary and cruel because the result is--which is, I guess, what they want-- that fewer people will be able to access coverage.

It also said the navigators no longer need to be based in the State where they are working. That means you can't go to on-the-ground efforts or face-to-face efforts, and that is what often makes the difference.

The Department of Justice last month said they are not going to defend the patient protections in the Affordable Care Act--particularly preexisting conditions. This has enormous ramifications for the people of this country. About half the people in the country have preexisting conditions. Under the old law--not in Maine, I might add; Maine dealt with this issue years ago. Under the old law, in most of the country, an insurance company could either deny you outright for a preexisting condition--which is basically any time you had been sick previously in your life--they could either deny you coverage or charge you an outrageous rate, which is, in effect, a denial of coverage for so many people.

Finally, the administration is now pressing what they are calling short-term association plans, which are really largely junk insurance-- insurance that is hardly useful, doesn't cover everything, has very high deductibles, and really gives people a feeling that they have insurance, but when it comes time to use it, it will not really provide coverage.

I would like to conclude with this picture of these wonderful people from Maine whom I was with last week. I don't know who this guy in the middle is, but these are the people who staff something called the Leavitt's Mill Free Health Plan. Every single person in this picture, with the exception of one part-time administrator, are volunteers. These are people coming in and volunteering. They are nurse practitioners, physicians who come in and volunteer for a couple of hours a week to provide healthcare to people who don't have insurance.

I just talked to the director, Patsy Levin. She repeated what she said to me when I was there last week: They want to go out of business. We can't provide healthcare to the millions of uninsured people of this country by volunteers. It is wonderful, what they are doing, but it is impossible. This is like having bake sales to support the Air Force.

We have to provide health insurance to people. We will have a healthier country. We will have a more productive country. We will have a more economically successful country. We will have a more humane country.

These people are fantastic. I spent time there. I visited with one of their clients. He has to go to town assistance to buy his insulin. That is wrong. He needs it. He is a diabetic. It is part of what he has to have to survive, and he is having to go for general assistance to the town to provide the lifesaving insulin that he needs.

These are wonderful people. They are doing great work, but we shouldn't have to rely on people taking their own time, their own energy voluntarily, to come in. It is wonderful for this region where it exists. There are several of these around Maine and they are terrific, but they can't fill the need. They can't fill the need for the millions of people who are uninsured in this country.

We have a responsibility. We have a responsibility when we see a problem to fix it. I know the Affordable Care Act is not perfect. I know it has problems. I know it has limitations. We should be fixing it, not sabotaging it.

As I said at the beginning, if the sabotage is ultimately successful, the result will be heightened demand for more radical restructuring of our healthcare system in this country because, ultimately, people are going to rightfully demand that they have a right to health insurance and to healthcare coverage and access to healthcare that is not dependent upon their income.

So I call on the administration to stop these petty efforts to undermine this law that has done so much good, and let's come together and talk about what the problems are. I know Members on this side are absolutely ready to do so.

Let's talk about fixing it, not continue to undermine it--to what purpose? To a purpose of diminishing healthcare access to millions and millions of Americans, not only those at the low end of the income spectrum but particularly those in the middle income who aren't fortunate enough to have coverage through where they work.

We can do better. I believe we will. I hope the administration will join us in this effort instead of continuing its efforts to systematically undermine the law that is working for the American people.

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