Designating the United States Courthouse Located At 300 South Fourth Street in Minneapolis, Minnesota, As the ``Diana E. Murphy United States Courthouse''
Floor Speech
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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, while it is perhaps not in line with official and genuine Senate protocol, I also want to use this opportunity to congratulate my good friend in the Chair on the wonderful events of last weekend for his family.
Mr. President, I have come to the floor to discuss my colleague Senator Baldwin's resolution that would protect the millions of Americans in Wisconsin and Oregon and all across the land who are faced with preexisting health conditions.
This has been an area I have focused on since my days as codirector of the Oregon Gray Panthers because preexisting conditions is kind of fancy lingo that people talk about as it relates to healthcare policy, but really what it is all about is, if you have cancer or diabetes or heart disease or asthma or any one of a score of healthcare conditions, before the Affordable Care Act, you were just in a world of hurt, literally and figuratively. In effect, the healthcare system then was for the healthy and the wealthy. If you were healthy, there was nothing to worry about--no preexisting condition. If you were wealthy, you just paid the bills, but if you had preexisting conditions, as millions and millions of Americans have, then you were really out of luck.
So then, along came the Affordable Care Act. I had written a piece of legislation, the Healthy Americans Act, with seven Democrats and seven Republicans as cosponsors. It had airtight, loophole-free protection for Americans against discrimination if they had preexisting conditions. That provision from the Healthy Americans Act, to a very great extent, made its way into the Affordable Care Act. That is why millions of Americans were able to go to bed at night with a sense of comfort and a sense that if they did have healthcare conditions, the insurance companies wouldn't be able to just clobber them with higher costs. Unfortunately, we have the Trump administration's wanting to bring back the days when healthcare was for the healthy and wealthy and allow discrimination against people with preexisting conditions.
The flip side of the preexisting condition coin is junk insurance-- selling junk insurance that really isn't worth a whole lot more than the paper it is written on. Boy, do I know something about junk insurance because that is how I started my time in public service, when senior citizens were sold 15 to 20 policies. Again, the rip-offs were built in. Back then, if you had one policy and you had another policy that offered similar coverage, they canceled each other out, and the senior got nothing. It was junk insurance. If we go back to the days when they discriminated against people with preexisting conditions, we are going to have junk insurance all over again.
I am going to begin with the Trump administration's record on this.
First of all, if you are a scam artist who is peddling junk plans, the Trump administration has your back. If you are a person with a preexisting condition, the Trump administration is advancing policies that will make both your health and your wallet in far worse shape. Now, the Trump officials get up and talk about the benefits of short- term plans. They will use buzz words like ``flexibility'' and ``patient-centered care,'' but I want everybody to be clear that it is junk insurance, plain and simple. It is putting a whole lot of lipstick on a frog.
These junk insurance plans the Trump administration has revived represent the very worst of industry tricks and abuses. They punish Americans who really need healthcare. If you are young, if you are healthy, and if you are wealthy, as I have said, there is nothing to worry about. With junk plans, you have a glide path to put scams on those with preexisting conditions like heart disease, cancer, and mental illness. They exist to prey on older Americans--on women, on the less fortunate--particularly a group that I have thought was the heart of where healthcare reform ought to go--to the folks between 55 and 65.
As I have indicated, junk plans are not new. Congress and the American people have rejected them before. I mentioned my history with the Oregon Gray Panthers. Big, thick stacks of legalese that nobody could understand were always hyped to the seniors. They were going to fill the gaps in Medicare. It was called Medigap. Back then, it was really just A and B. It didn't have D and Medicare Advantage and all kinds of other things. It was just A and B.
You had seniors frightened that the gaps in Medicare were going to consume any savings they might have. So every time a fast-talking salesperson came through, a senior would buy a policy. When I was the director of the Gray Panthers, it was common to go to seniors' homes, and they would actually go to a closet and pull out a shoebox full of these worthless policies. I really fear we are looking at going back to those days.
The fact is that Congress finally cracked down on those Medigap rip- offs. I had an opportunity to be a part of that effort as a Member of the other body, the House, but a lot of people got hurt in the process.
Junk insurance was not just a problem for seniors. A few years ago, the Affordable Care Act was designed, as I mentioned, in terms of the Healthy Americans Act, to make sure that junk insurance would be eliminated across the board. Across the board, we would say in our country, we are going to have ironclad, loophole-free guarantees that no American would ever face discrimination over a preexisting condition.
By the way, that used to be a bipartisan proposition. The fact is that still serving in this body are a number of my colleagues on the Republican side who are cosponsors of the Healthy Americans Act, with that ironclad, loophole-free protection for those with preexisting conditions. So it is not as if somebody just kind of brought this up as a partisan issue. It was bipartisan then. Republican Members of this body, distinguished colleagues, were cosponsors of that Healthy Americans Act proposition. Now the Trump administration is trying to turn back the clock. It wants to make junk plans great again--a forced march back to those days that I described that were only for the healthy and the wealthy.
The open enrollment plan for health insurance is coming up very quickly. The Trump administration has cut it in half so that it is going to last only a few weeks this year. That means, during the holidays, when Americans are traveling, shopping, and spending time with family, they will also have to make some judgments about health insurance. Because of the Trump administration's actions, these junk insurance policies are going to be peddled at the same time as insurance that would actually cover, meaningfully, the healthcare that our people need.
What they are going to be doing with these Trump changes is making life easy for the scam artists but a nightmare for so many Americans who, day in and day out, walk an economic tightrope just trying to pay for essentials. These rip-off artists under the Trump plan are going to have a green light to steal the money Americans pay in premiums and for other expenses. According to a recent study, sometimes as much as $2 out of every $3 is wasted on overhead with these administrative costs and junk insurance profits in these flawed policies that the Trump administration wants to foist off on Americans.
The disastrous effects of junk insurance aren't limited to those who get conned into buying it. By bringing junk plans back, the Trump administration, in effect, goes out and swings a wrecking ball into the private health insurance markets in our country. It raises costs across the board, and Americans waste their hard-earned dollars.
Senator Baldwin has a resolution, and I commend my colleague from Wisconsin on her effort on this. She came and talked with me about this early on, as the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. We have jurisdiction over something like $1 trillion worth of health spending. I really appreciate the expertise and the passion that Senator Baldwin has brought to this issue, and we saw it in her very first presentation on what she wanted to do. Her resolution is the Senate's best opportunity to put a stop to the scams that I have described. It would throw the Trump administration's junk insurance rules out, and with Senator Baldwin's proposal, it would restore the protections that millions of Americans count on each day.
The Democrats in the Senate are going to stand up for Americans with preexisting conditions, and I hope colleagues on the other side will join us. I recognize that the Trump administration will not, but my hope is that we will have colleagues on the other side supporting us for Senator Baldwin's resolution.
In addition, as if this were not enough of an injury foisted on vulnerable Americans, the Trump administration has put forward a nominee for a seat on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals who made healthcare sabotage one of his top priorities at the Trump Justice Department. Chad Readler, currently the Deputy Assistant Attorney General, in my view, is the wrong choice to be a Federal judge.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration decided it just wanted to get out of the business of enforcing the rules that protect Americans with preexisting conditions. In fact, it had to argue in court that it could abandon that essential part of the Affordable Care Act, which was still the law of the land the last time I looked. Who did the administration turn to when it needed to cook up a dubious legal argument that it had no obligation to enforce the law of the land? Chad Readler. In fact, three career attorneys from the Department of Justice looked at his argument, and they actually withdrew from the case. Three career lawyers from the Department of Justice refused to participate.
The Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Mr. Readler's nomination earlier this month. His nomination could be sent to the floor of the Senate in the coming weeks, but it ought to be clear that this is a nominee who is not an impartial individual who has the judicial temperament Americans expect. He is not somebody who ought to be handed a seat on the Federal bench and have the power to sign off on the Trump administration's agenda of healthcare sabotage.
I close with this. The Senate has an opportunity to stand up this week for the millions of vulnerable Americans who have these preexisting conditions, for the millions of Americans who under the Affordable Care Act can go to bed at night knowing that if they have preexisting conditions, they are not going to lose everything. I am serious when I talk about losing everything. Once you go back to discriminating against people with preexisting conditions, you are going to go back to job lock and all of the problems we saw associated with discrimination. If you were in Montana or if you were in Oregon and had a preexisting condition and you got offered a better job on the other side of town, you couldn't go get it because you would not be able to get coverage because there was discrimination against people with preexisting conditions.
This week the Senate is going to have an opportunity to stand up to the Trump administration and go to bat for the millions and millions of Americans who are watching this debate who have preexisting conditions and who are just counting on this body not to turn back the clock and leave them vulnerable again. Senator Baldwin's resolution would prevent the Trump administration from bringing back the worst abuses of junk insurance. If it doesn't pass this week, this will be an issue that, in my view, will come up again and again and again until it is fixed.
Finally, the Readler nomination, in my view, ought to be stopped in its tracks. The Senate ought to tell the administration that it is not going to rubberstamp judicial nominees who have proven, demonstrable track records of twisting the law in a way that harms the most vulnerable of our citizens.
I note that the majority leader is here.
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