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Floor Speech

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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I know many of my constituents are contacting me about the rising cost of healthcare. I know that many of my colleagues are saying that they are being contacted about the rising cost of healthcare.

Believe it or not, some of it is impacted by tariffs--some of it, the anxiety of what happened when Medicaid was threatened in the Big Beautiful Bill. But most specifically now, they are hearing from their State insurance commissioners that rates are going to go up as early as October 15 in the State of Idaho and in many, many States across the country, as early as November 1, are starting to now have to make a choice. Are they going to pay for this huge increase in insurance premiums because this institution, this body, did not deal with the Affordable Care Act extensions of subsidies that provided affordable health insurance to millions of Americans?

This is something that is already going to affect the burden that rural hospitals have. It is going to burden Americans as they try to keep working, and it is going to burden an ever increasing healthcare system that is facing these costs.

I hope that we can do something, to make a commitment to focus on affordability. Why? The American people are seeing a huge cost increase in groceries, in gasoline, in everyday products. Our manufacturers are seeing increases in cost. And so this is an issue that needs to be tackled today, not in a few weeks when you are locked in to the higher rates. It is not something that can be done by the end of the year because you are going to be locked in to higher rates. This is something that Congress and the administration need to hash out now.

Now, I am an advocate of--I wish we would have hashed it out last summer. I basically started realizing in July that this was going to affect my State, when our insurance commissioner came up with what they predicted would be a 20-plus-percent increase in rates, and we started speaking with small businesses across the State who said it was going to affect their ability to keep their employees because of the cost of healthcare.

So what are we doing now? Well, instead of addressing this issue, the Affordable Care Act healthcare market rate extension of making sure that premiums don't rise significantly on many Americans, people are denying that the problem exists or that the deadline is actually here-- past due, really--to affect what we think is an emergency.

Last week, my office released a report showing that dramatic increases in premiums for many States in the United States have already gotten approval, and just one chart that I will show you shows those increased rates, not just for the State of Washington--which we saw a 21-percent increase--but for many other States: Arizona, which they are proposing a 48-percent increase; Georgia, 39-percent increase; North Carolina, 29.36 percent; and Texas, 39.28 percent.

Why are they going up so much? Well, insurers are saying in their States, the primary reason, as I mentioned earlier, administration tariffs, cost of delivering the healthcare system, and the pending failure of Congress to extend the tax credits in the Affordable Care Act. As a result, as I said, many people will be paying these higher rates, but 5 million Americans across the country, including 80,000 Washingtonians, the estimates are, will just no longer be able to afford insurance.

That is the estimate: 5 million Americans across the country, 80,000 in my State, will just be like, ``Nope, can't afford insurance anymore, not going to buy it.'' Why is that so important? Well, because the Affordable Care Act drove down the rate of uninsured in America from about 15 percent to about 7 percent. That decrease in uncompensated care helped us reduce our overall healthcare costs too, for people who are getting insurance in many different ways.

When you have uncompensated care, the costs don't just evaporate and go into the sky. They are paid by the rest of us in the system. Failing to deal with this affects everybody's healthcare, not just those on the Affordable Care Act premium plan of extension of these credits. It affects everybody because you are increasing the cost of healthcare throughout the entire system.

I don't want to roll the dice on this and find out what happens to many of my constituents. I don't want to find out what happens when people who don't have health insurance get sick anyway and go to the emergency room or have a devastating diagnosis just because we wouldn't act. When you think about this, the ranks of people who are in this uninsured market don't stop getting sick. They do still have costs, and that uncompensated care is what drove up the cost of our healthcare system overall.

So now, as we face inflation, it is the last thing we should be doing, is to drive up the cost of anything just because we have failed to act. The last thing we need to do is discover that, on November 1, that those premiums, which will go into place as people purchase those plans, is something that we can't reverse for the future--because the market is a marketplace. It is a marketplace of insurance. If we want to affect this, we should affect it now.

In August, I asked the chairman and ranking member of the Finance Committee to hold a hearing on how to lower these costs for Americans and find ways to keep people insured and healthy. Unfortunately, the Senate Finance Committee did not even meet in September and did not schedule any hearings to actually even discuss this particular problem.

I would have hoped that there would have been an illumination with our report, as everybody realized these rates are going to get locked in, people are going to make purchase decisions in November and December, and then, as I said, lots of people will just say, ``I can't afford these rates. They're insane, and now I'm going to just drop out of the marketplace. But yeah, I'm still going to get sick, and I'm still going to cost the hospital and the part of the State that may not even be able to afford it. I'm still going to have uncompensated care costs.''

All of this could have been discussed, and that is why, when we put out the report, we expressed the urgency by sending the same letter-- not a big political letter, but a letter--to the ranking member and chairman of the Finance Committee, but also to the leadership of the Senate, the House, and the President, saying you need to wake up to this problem. This problem is real. It will affect our economy. It will affect millions of people, and it will affect the rest of us by driving up the cost of health insurance.

So I heard Speaker Johnson on the television this morning saying that extending the ACA credits is a December issue. Well, it is not really a December issue if people start, in October and November, making decisions and locking themselves into higher rates or deciding that they are not going to even buy insurance because it is too expensive.

He said, ``Reforms are needed to the program.'' Great. We could have had that discussion in August or September, and we certainly could have it today, but I see no convening. The House isn't even here. I see no convening of people saying, ``Let's get serious about these extensions and the high cost of health insurance.'' Families are relying on the exchange, and these decisions need to be made during this open enrollment period.

I know people are thinking, ``Oh, this is such a geeky issue.'' Trust me: I know that many Americans are frustrated over enrollment periods for health insurance period, okay? They are always challenged by the fact that an employer or this healthcare system--yes, we need to keep working to improve the healthcare system. But right now, we don't want to lose millions of people from the healthcare system just because we don't want to talk about it and somebody wants to talk about it later.

To enroll by December 15, you need to know what the premium costs are. To get coverage starting on January 1, you need to enroll by December 15. So that means you have to know what this situation is all about now. When these insurance commissioners across the country--go back to those rates--started publishing those rates, that is when everybody should have woken up and said, ``What the heck are we talking about?'' Thirty, 40, almost 40 percent in Arizona, 40 percent. What are we talking about?

Insurance commissioners are proposing--oh, by the way, maybe in a few red States, they knew it was so bad they didn't even want to put the information out there. Our report published a lot of this, and people weren't even thinking about it. They weren't even thinking about or letting people put out the information about how high the rates were going to be. So why would you do that? Why not address the underlying issue and say, ``What are we doing about the high cost of healthcare?''

So my colleagues on the other side are so confident. Let's hear what their proposal is. Let's hear what they are going to do--because I am pretty sure the tariffs, the Medicaid cuts, and this proposal not to deal with the Affordable Care Act extension are driving up these rates to extraordinary rates that are going to hurt all Americans by making healthcare more expensive.

So I will just say we didn't even have a hearing in the committee of jurisdiction on the fact that we cut a trillion dollars out of the healthcare system and stripped Medicaid coverage from 11 million Americans. We didn't even have a hearing on that. So, our constituents, Mr. President, should be listened to. We need to address this issue. We want Members to figure out how to make healthcare more affordable for millions of Americans.

The 119th Congress thus far has squandered too much time focusing too little on this issue. We need to roll up our sleeves and focus on immediate, real solutions that impact millions of Americans. Together, we can figure out a way to extend these expiring credits and come up with solutions to lower those costs, and I urge my colleagues to do so as soon as possible. The American people are depending on us to help them not face these enormous inflationary costs.

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