Executive Calendar
Floor Speech
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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, as the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, I can tell the Senate this morning that there is no higher priority for Senate Finance Democrats than the well-being of healthcare patients in this country and how strongly we feel about their having a right to good quality, affordable healthcare coverage.
Right now, too many of those folks are getting ripped off by an insurance lobbyist's dream--taxpayer-funded junk insurance--or by Big Pharma, which is always, always looking to engage in price gouging for one reason: They can get away with it. Take insulin. Insulin prices are up thirteenfold in recent years. The drug is not 13 times better. It is the same insulin that has been around for decades. But the reason the pharmaceutical companies do it is because they can get away with it.
This morning, I am going to take a few minutes and talk about what this really means for patients because I can tell you, this fall, there are a lot of families across this country who would rather be prepping for holidays than worrying about their healthcare. Unfortunately, the Trump administration is refusing to provide that kind of security for our patients.
To begin, let me tell you about a youngster in Oregon named Jasper. Jasper is 3, full of energy and love, and a big fan of playtime with cars and trucks and trains. He was born, however, with huge medical challenges--cystic fibrosis, cardiac and pancreatic problems, hearing loss. He needs a variety of treatments multiple times a day. It is so hard on Jasper's family. It is so hard on Jasper. And, of course, the costs of Jasper's care are in the stratosphere. The family is fortunate to have health insurance through a parent's employer. They know how absolutely vital it is to have what they consider to be a lifeline--the protection of the Affordable Care Act.
At the heart of the Affordable Care Act are bedrock, ironclad protections for people like them--no discrimination by insurance companies against preexisting conditions. That was something we used to have some support for from the other side of the aisle. I know about that because I wrote a bipartisan bill that had airtight, loophole-free protection against what essentially was discrimination against those with preexisting conditions, and we got it into the Affordable Care Act.
Yet now we see the other side of the aisle trying to unravel those protections. They are trying to unravel the protection that we see for patients with respect to big expenses. Our approach has no annual or lifetime limits on coverage, no coverage denials that dragged people into bureaucratic nightmares, has young people covered on their parents' plan until age 26, and lots more. Those protections saved people's lives and made healthcare affordable for millions of Americans.
Unfortunately, with the support of my colleagues here on the other side in the Senate, the Trump administration wants to eliminate those protections that are so important to Jasper and families like his. My colleagues on the other side are standing by and basically doing nothing while the administration and Republican-led States are out there maneuvering in the courts to get the entire Affordable Care Act wiped out.
The so-called Texas case, which is an absurd lawsuit based on an absurd argument--an argument that wouldn't pass the smell test in a middle class school mock trial--somehow rightwing, ideological judges have kept it alive. Because this lawsuit keeps hanging around, tens of millions of Americans might lose their healthcare with hardly any warning and no fallback options to protect them.
Now Republicans have claimed they have fix-it bills they could pass in the event their allies took down the Affordable Care Act. They do read like they were written by the lawyers and the lobbyists on the payroll of the big insurance companies. If insurance companies can hike up the cost of treating a preexisting condition so high that it becomes unaffordable, it is no different from being denied coverage at the outset.
While the Texas case moves forward, the Trump administration is continuing to allow junk insurance scam artists to defraud Americans into buying worthless plans that aren't worth really the paper they are written on and certainly don't cover the healthcare Americans need.
I want to be very specific about it. This is an insurance lobbyist's dream. You have tax breaks for junk insurance. That is on every insurance lobbyist's wish list for the holidays. I think it is federally funded fraud, plain and simple, but unfortunately it has the support of a lot of Republicans here in the Congress.
It is now the middle of the open enrollment period for health insurance on healthcare.gov. The Trump administration's support for junk plans has created a whole new burden for families across the country who are shopping for insurance.
I am particularly troubled by this because I remember what junk insurance used to be like. I was director of the senior citizens at home for almost 7 years before I was elected to the Congress, and those were the days when you could go around the country, whether it was Montana or Oregon or anywhere else, and fast-talking salesmen would sell 10, 15, sometimes 20 policies to supplement a senior's Medicare. They were called Medigap policies, and they were useless. Seniors should have saved that money to pay the rent and maybe make sure they had heat in their houses.
Finally, we got rid of those Medigap rip-off policies. When I came to the Congress, it was my top priority. We got it passed. It was a bipartisan proposal. But now junk plans are back. They are different from those Medigap rip-offs, but, much like what I battled when I was the head of the senior citizens in Oregon, they are still built around the same proposition. They are essentially worthless. They are an insurance lobbyist's dream. In the case of what we are dealing with-- the administration gutting the Affordable Care Act--I think it is essentially Federal tax breaks for junk insurance, and that is why I think it is tantamount to federally funded fraud.
The Trump administration's support for junk plans has created a whole new burden for families across the country who are trying to shop for insurance that gives them real value. Those shoppers used to be able to trust that junk plans had actually been banned from the marketplace. Now those shoppers have to wade through Byzantine and manipulative marketing scams and incomprehensible insurance lingo to try to figure out if they are getting coverage that actually helps them or, as I have described too often, just worthless junk.
What is worse, the Trump administration actually redirects people looking for coverage from the healthcare.gov website to third-party brokers who can sell unsuspecting customers junk plans. I think it is astounding that the Trump administration has seen fit to heap another burden on vulnerable people. After we have called this administration out on it, they are not willing to do anything to correct it.
But unfortunately, since the beginning of the Trump administration-- with the help of too many allies in the Congress--it has been one attempt after another to take healthcare away from vulnerable Americans, from millions of vulnerable Americans, those like 3-year-old little Jasper and his family, that I started talking about at home in Oregon.
On a fundamental level, this is a debate about whether this country is going to go back to the days when healthcare was only for the healthy and wealthy. That was the way it worked, if the insurance companies could clobber somebody with a preexisting condition. If you are healthy, it didn't matter. You did not have to worry. If you were wealthy, you just sat down and wrote out a check. That is the way it worked.
But when I came to the Senate, we put together a bipartisan bill, airtight, loophole-free protection for those with preexisting conditions. There are colleagues on the other side of the aisle who cosponsored my bill--and by the way, the President of the Senate knows who was the leader of that effort, one of his predecessors in the Utah delegation, the late Senator Bennet.
So this idea that we are just going to sit around and go back to the days when healthcare was for the healthy and wealthy, that is not acceptable to Finance Democrats that I have the honor to work with. It is not acceptable to any of us on this side, and it should not be acceptable to my colleagues in the Congress.
That is where Donald Trump wants to return to, the days when healthcare was for the healthy and wealthy. They have made it clear by working to eliminate preexisting condition protections in the Congress and the courts, by giving insurance lobbyists Federal tax breaks for junk insurance plans, and by seeking to slash health programs for the vulnerable.
I just want to make it clear that, on this side of the aisle, we are about patients. We are about protecting patients. We are about the proposition that in a country as strong and good and rich as ours-- where we are going to spend $3.5 trillion this year on healthcare, if you divide the number of Americans, like maybe 325 million into $3.5 trillion, you could send every family of four in America a check for $40,000. We are spending enough to take care of patients.
We ought to be doing more to protect, rather than turning back the clock on young people like Jasper and his family. I just wanted to make it clear, we will be on the floor talking about more patients in the days ahead and on the fight, a fight we are going to prosecute relentlessly, to protect those patients under the Affordable Care Act.
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Mr. WYDEN. If my colleague would yield?
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Mr. WYDEN. My understanding--and, again, I have listened to my colleague on the Finance Committee. He is a champion on not going back, but going forward with more Medicare-type choices. Like making that person who is really wondering if they are going to make it until 65 in order to get to Medicare, he would like--for example, say an older woman who has been a victim of age discrimination, did not have much money, he would like to make them eligible for Medicare at 60 or 61 or something like that.
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