Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2019
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, what the Trump administration is doing to sabotage healthcare in our country is a monumental scandal in slow motion. What the President promised was better care for all Americans at lower cost. What he and his officials have delivered is special deals for special interests and rewards for rip-offs.
It is almost as if you took the clock above the Chamber and turned it back. What Americans want--and I heard it at townhall meetings last weekend at home in Oregon--is to move forward on healthcare. They want, for example, to have strong measures, not empty rhetoric, to hold down the cost of their medicines--lifting the restrictions so that Medicare can bargain and hold down the cost of medicine and use the smart principles of negotiating power that the private sector uses all the time. They want to move forward on healthcare, not backward.
There is no clearer example of the administration's trying to take the country back on healthcare than its efforts to give a green light to junk health insurance. Junk health insurance represents all of the unsavory insurance industry tricks and abuses that the Affordable Care Act sought to eliminate. Junk plans exist, literally and figuratively, so that companies can prey on the vulnerable and the people with preexisting conditions, such as if you have asthma or diabetes, or prey on women, prey on older people, or prey on the less fortunate. They certainly don't exist to cover the healthcare that Americans actually need because that is where they always fall short.
The centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act was an ironclad, loophole- free guarantee that no American would ever face discrimination over a preexisting condition.
I note that my friend, the President of the Senate, has joined the Chamber. He knows this pretty well because he worked with me on our bipartisan effort to ensure that there would be loophole-free, airtight protection for Americans from discrimination against those with a preexisting conditions. For all practical purposes, we got what we worked on in a bipartisan way, when we had eight Democrats and eight Republicans. We got that into the Affordable Care Act. Essentially, now what the Trump administration seeks to do is to undo that guarantee of airtight, loophole-free protection for people who have these preexisting conditions.
I am going to read a question that appears on an application for one of these plans that are being marketed now. Under a bold headline that says ``Important: You must answer the questions below as they apply to You and all other family members applying for coverage,'' the question reads: ``Within the past 5 years, have you or any other person to be insured been aware of, diagnosed, treated by a member of the medical profession or taken [medication] for: cancer or a tumor, stroke, heart disorder, heart attack, coronary bypass or stent, peripheral vascular disease, carotid artery disease, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease or emphysema, kidney disorder or disease, neurological disorder, degenerative disc disease or herniation/bulge, rheumatoid arthritis, degenerative joint disease of the knee or hip, diabetes, Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, any eating disorder [or] alcohol abuse or chemical dependency, or does anyone listed on the application currently weigh over 250 pounds (women) or over 300 pounds (men)?''
Another question on the same application asks, ``Have you or any other person to be insured been hospitalized for a mental health condition in the past 5 years or been treated by a member of the medical profession for a mental health condition in the past 12 months?''
Finally, another question asks, ``Have you or any other person to be insured ever been diagnosed or treated for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), AIDS-related complex, or any other immune system disorder such as HIV?''
I would also note that this part of the application contained a number of typos, a mislabeled number, and a mislabeled word. Apparently, the scam artists are as bad at editing their documents as they are at covering the healthcare people actually need. But setting aside the bad grammar, the questions collectively tick through dozens of health categories that include hundreds of various conditions and illnesses, so we are talking about well more than 100 million Americans who would answer yes to at least one of them.
Americans need to know and they ought to know that the only reason junk insurance companies ask these probing questions about your health background is to use the information against you and keep you from getting meaningful coverage. That forms the basis of the Trump-era discrimination against those with a preexisting condition.
A lot of people have preexisting conditions. What is that? Everybody knows folks in Tennessee or in Oregon who have asthma or diabetes. We are talking about millions of Americans.
When my colleague from Tennessee and I were working together--eight Democrats, eight Republicans--I said: You know, it is really going to be monumental if we get airtight, loophole-free protection for those with pre-existing conditions. The reason I said that is that ever since I was director of the senior citizens at home, the Gray Panthers, it has been clear to me that as long as our country allowed discrimination against those with preexisting conditions, healthcare in America would basically be for the healthy and the wealthy. If you are healthy, no sweat, no preexisting conditions, and if you are wealthy, you have no real problems because you can just write out the checks to pay for your treatment. But now we are talking about going back to those days--not the days when the Senator from Tennessee and I and other Democrats and Republicans got together and did something that really was a monumental step forward, protecting millions of people with preexisting conditions--now we are going backward.
What are those Americans going to hear in their time of need when their cancer comes back or when they face another bout of medical illness? What they are going to hear, with policies like the one I just read from, is the fraudsters who conned them into buying the junk insurance basically saying: You are on your own. And those Americans are going to be buried under mountains of medical debt.
By the way, we are talking about medical debt. I think my friend from Tennessee and I have talked about this over the years. Healthcare is the great equalizer. For example, in a discussion Democrats ran yesterday on healthcare, we had a gentleman who did everything right. He worked hard. He was a professional. He was constantly trying to better himself and contribute--not just supporting his family but the community. He got Parkinson's. All of a sudden, he wasn't able to pay his bills. So healthcare is the great equalizer in America.
When I read about the junk plans, I have to tell you, it takes me back to the old days when these scam artists preyed on the seniors who needed insurance coverage above and beyond what they got from traditional Medicare.
Mr. President and colleagues, this is something that is very personal to me. When I was a young man, I was codirector of the Oregon Gray Panthers. I would go and visit seniors in their homes--very often they would have a small apartment or something--and they would go in the back, and they would pull out a shoebox full of Medigap policies. These were policies that insurance salesmen sold them that the salesmen said would fill in the gaps in Medicare. Frequently, a senior would spend thousands of dollars--this was a number of years ago--on these policies that were worth little more than the paper they were written on. They often contained--we saw this at our legal aid program for seniors--what were called subrogation clauses, which essentially meant that if you had another policy that covered it, the first one didn't have to cover it. The two of them canceled each other out. So vulnerable seniors with serious medical conditions would get conned into buying these plans that were essentially worthless.
After years of effort--we began in Oregon in the State insurance commission office. I had the honor of getting elected to represent Oregon in the U.S. House of Representatives. We began there and continued it in the Senate. We acted in a bipartisan fashion to eliminate the junk plans. We did that literally decades ago. We drained the swamp, to use the lingo of today. We really drained the swamp as it related to these rip-off Medigap policies. We got it down to a handful.
I would be willing to bet that the Senator from Tennessee, the Senator from Ohio, and my other colleagues on the floor don't have folks at home coming up to them any longer and telling them that they have rip-off Medigap insurance. I haven't had a complaint about that for years and years. Now the Trump administration is trying to bring back junk insurance for an even larger portion of the American people-- more people than just the seniors.
The bad news with these junk policies doesn't begin and end with discrimination and debt. The Trump administration is letting the junk insurance companies steal the money Americans pay in premiums and other expenses.
According to one recent study, half of each premium dollar and sometimes as much as two-thirds gets wasted on overhead, administrative costs, and profits. The Affordable Care Act had a rule that banned that kind of waste. The Trump administration threw it out so that the rip- off artists can once again pocket unsuspecting Americans' premium dollars.
What the Trump administration is doing to undermine healthcare is not only playing out in what is called the individual insurance market; the harmful threat is a threat to the 167 million Americans who get their insurance through their jobs as well.
Worse healthcare at a higher cost--a far cry from what people were promised a few years ago--is clearly a growing problem. Worse healthcare. Higher costs. A forced march back to the days when healthcare in America, as I have said--and it has really been my reference point as much as anything--I said: Let's not turn back the clock to the days when healthcare was for the healthy and wealthy. This junk insurance is unquestionably the kickoff of this administration's formal effort to do just that.
There was an effort in the Affordable Care Act to build a functional market that didn't trample all over typical Americans and their families. The President and his allies in Congress have done everything they can--starting with an Executive order on day one--to empower the scam artists and powerful companies to have the ability to make healthcare worse and rip off our people. That has been the story from day one of this administration. As I said a few minutes ago, it is a monumental scandal in slow motion.
On behalf of those Americans who are hurting, who are not being taken care of, many of us are going to do everything we can to make sure--for those who are getting hurt, who can't afford these kinds of practices, we are going to keep this front and center of the American people until we end this consumer scourge.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source