Adopting the Rules of the House of Representatives for the 116th Congress

Floor Speech

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Mr. NEAL. Madam Speaker, I thank Secretary Shalala for yielding.

Madam Speaker, I feel like I have a preexisting condition. It is arguing about the Affordable Care Act. For 10 years we have argued about the Affordable Care Act. A campaign is part of forming a government, and no issue resonated with the American people in the last election like the issue of preexisting conditions.

My friend, the gentleman from California, previously said he didn't understand why people had to buy something that they didn't want. Well, we require people to buy automobile insurance. And, by the way, you don't buy automobile insurance the day after you have been in an automobile accident. And we probably don't want to buy homeowners insurance, but, guess what; we don't buy it the day after our house is burned down. We buy it because the genius of insurance is the spreading of risk.

So I ask the following rhetorical question, and that is, why should the rest of us annually put $1,000 into our premiums for health insurance to take care of those who don't want to buy health insurance?

So what this discussion and argument is really about, for the moment, is the following: The child who is born with diabetes is then told, under the old system, that they can never buy health insurance, or, if they do, it has to be rated--back to the old actuarial argument about how do we spread risk.

The protections that were built into the Affordable Care Act, which I helped to write, were based upon the idea of using the best principles of the marketplace while simultaneously using the ability of the Federal Government to prod certain behaviors, and those behaviors included a ban on preexisting conditions as an option for people who didn't want to buy health insurance.

So what did the other side do? They filed the lawsuit. Now, they generally lecture us on activist judges. They decided that they would challenge what has become okay with the American people, the Affordable Care Act. They would challenge it in the Federal courts and really didn't want to bring down the entire Affordable Care Act. Instead, they wanted to disassemble piece by piece parts of the Affordable Care Act that really, in a lot of ways, have made for its success.

There is no argument with the following statistic that, today, between 17 and 20 million Americans have health insurance that didn't have it before the Affordable Care Act.

And back to those people who, by the way, their system of healthcare was the emergency room. So, in the emergency room, we all know, it is a pretty poor way to get health insurance because it really doesn't emphasize preventive care.

So all of these options that we built into the Affordable Care Act, including making sure that people that had preexisting conditions couldn't be exploited in the marketplace with undue costs, this argument that we continue to have, Madam Speaker, here about the Affordable Care Act could be rectified in short order by both sides just working together to improve the Affordable Care Act.

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