Make Quality Health Insurance More Affordable

Floor Speech

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Ms. UNDERWOOD. Madam Speaker, Saturday, March 23, we celebrated the ninth anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which has expanded health insurance to over 20 million people in the last 5 years. But quality health insurance remains unaffordable and out of reach for far too many Americans.

Today, I introduced the Health Care Affordability Act to help fix that and reduce premiums for Americans who purchase private health plans through the marketplace.

My legislation would cut premiums by hundreds or thousands of dollars per year for more than 10 million people. It does this by increasing the tax credits people get to make premiums more affordable and allowing more people to qualify for tax credits.

This important improvement would guarantee middle-class consumers would pay no more than 8\1/2\ percent of their income on premiums. This would be a huge help to families.

For example, in my district, a typical family of four currently pays $1,741 per month for marketplace coverage. With my bill, their monthly premiums would drop by nearly half.

A typical 60-year-old couple in my district making $80,000 currently pays over a third of their monthly income for marketplace coverage. My legislation would reduce their monthly premiums by over $1,700.

This legislation moves us forward by making lower cost coverage available to at least 9 million uninsured Americans, while reducing premiums for an additional 10 million Americans.

Madam Speaker, I encourage my colleagues to join me in making quality health insurance more affordable by cosponsoring this important legislation.

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