Medical Bills Are Too High

Floor Speech

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Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia for yielding to me and for putting this together. I appreciate the fact that she took the leadership and initiative to bring this forward. I also thank my colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus, as well, for taking a stand on this issue and the House Democratic Caucus overall.

This is the issue that we fought about with respect to the government shutdown. This is the issue that has not gone away. I suppose the White House and my Republican colleagues were hoping that it would, but it is worse now than it was even then.

In fact, the Republicans knew this problem was coming all the way back on January 20 when Mr. Trump first took office. To much fanfare, they began moving forward with his legislative agenda, the big, beautiful bill and other pieces of legislation. I don't even know how many executive orders they put together and put out undermining the government from the standpoint of government employees and making damaging impacts across the board.

They failed to address this particular issue. In fact, I will come back to that in a moment. Not only did they not address extending the tax credits for the Affordable Care Act, but they made the problem even worse. The big, ugly bill that they passed included a $1 trillion cut to Medicaid.

The healthcare safety net in this country, to the extent it is a safety net, was damaged terribly by what they have done, and it is about to get infinitely worse when these tax credits expire at the end of the month.

I know my Republican colleagues have been fighting against ObamaCare for years now. I can remember back when it was first passed 15 years ago in this Chamber. There were over 60 votes to repeal and replace the ObamaCare piece of legislation. They kept going year after year after year. Somewhere along the way, about 5 years in, they found out that the American people actually like ObamaCare. They don't call it ObamaCare. They might call it the Affordable Care Act, but they kind of liked not having pregnancy treated as a preexisting condition, and they kind of liked having the ability to have their kids stay on their family insurance plans until they turned 26.

The efforts to repeal it not only failed, but it has gotten stronger over the years because people have come to realize that without it, they might not be able to afford healthcare at all.

I have decided to bring in a couple of comments from people in my district. There are too many to read all of them, but this one is from Beth, who lives in Greenbelt, Maryland, which is in my district. She is looking at her premiums going up $9,372 this year. She has major health conditions that require ongoing healthcare that she can't avoid. They were brought on by a major surgery that she underwent several years ago.

Her case isn't unique. In the State of Maryland, it is estimated that the impact will be on 14,000 or so members of my district. A 60-year- old couple with an $82,000 income is looking at a 168 percent increase if these affordable care tax credits are allowed to expire. A family of four, ages 45, 45, 15, and 10, is looking at a 200 percent increase in their monthly premiums. Obviously, most families can't sustain that.

I am going to pick one. I read an article in the Washington Post a little while ago. This is a gentleman in Altoona, Pennsylvania. That is not my district, obviously; that is the district of Congressman Joyce. Matt Hornberger is 61 years old and from Altoona, Pennsylvania. Monthly payments for him and his wife will rise from $670 to $2,054. He said this: ``Between the high deductible and $25,000 in premiums, this is 40 percent of our income. I am just trying to live a life here and be able to go to the doctor when you need to go to the doctor.''

He ought to be able to do that. In fact, every American ought to be able to do that.

What have we gotten from our Republican colleagues in the 9 months or so since they took over the White House, the House, and the Senate? Not much. I remember the President saying in the debate that he didn't have a plan, that he had a concept of a plan. I am not sure we have gotten much past the concept point 9 months later, but he did talk about HSAs.

I was looking at that, doing a little research, and an economist, Doug Holtz-Eakin, who works for the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank, said this: ``There is a place for health savings accounts to augment insurance and fill things out around the edges, but it can't be the core insurance product.''

The reason for that is because it is not designed to be the core insurance product. As a matter of fact, we have HSAs in place now, but 66 percent or so of these have only $1,000 or less in the account.

As you heard from my colleague from Virginia, $1,000 doesn't go a long way in our healthcare system. It is $70,000 a day for the NICU system. I am a kidney cancer survivor. A thousand dollars sure wouldn't have covered my insurance for the surgery that I underwent. As a matter of fact, it wouldn't have even covered the MRI that allowed us to find it, fortunately, very early on.

Now, what is the path forward?

Mr. Speaker, I have to complain a bit because we have been talking about this issue the whole time. I am a father. I have six kids, and this reminds me a little bit of one of them.

He came home from school one day and he looked at his mom, of course, and said: Mom, will you help me with this project I have? She said: Honey, I am a little tied up right now. Can I help you out later? He said: We can't really wait on this. She said: Why not? He said: It is because it is a big part of my grade. It is a huge part of my grade. She said: Okay. I will help you out with it, but when is it due? He said: Tomorrow. She said: When did you know about this project?

As it turned out, he knew he had this assignment months ago, but he hadn't done anything to get ready for it. He hadn't let us know that he needed the help to work on it, and he certainly hadn't done any work to prepare the project.

That is what our Republican colleagues are doing right now. They came into office on January 20th knowing that these ACA tax credits were going to expire. They didn't do anything to address it. Not only that, but we brought it to their attention when this bill was moving through, the big, ugly bill. We tried to address it then, but they refused to extend the tax credits then. We tried to offer amendments at the committee level. I am on the Appropriations Committee. We offered four of those to try and amend this piece just to extend it. Let's try and fix it. If you have other things you want to do it with it, let's extend it now so it doesn't expire.

They refused to do it. They voted it down four times on a party-line vote over and over again just like they had done over the previous 15 years when they were trying to get rid of it. Maybe this is death by a thousand cuts in their minds, but something strange happened along the way.

The American people started getting these notices in the mail that their premiums were about to double or triple. The American people, millions of them across the country, started realizing that there is no way they can afford to pay that. They are going to be forced into the choice of either dropping the insurance or take some other drastic measure like selling their house. One lady said she might have to pull her kid out of college to pay for this healthcare coverage.

It is absolutely outrageous, but the failure to do something until the eleventh hour is a total abdication of their responsibility of leadership, not just in the House, not just in the Senate, not just in the White House but entirely across the board.

The Republican Party didn't wake up to this until the American people started screaming in their ears. Well, now, here we are. What is the path forward?

Senator Schumer back during the government shutdown at the end of it said: Tell you what. Why don't we just extend it for a year. Let's put a task force together to try and work out the differences because I understand the Republicans don't agree with everything. Let's take a year and extend it and try and work it out.

Not only did the Republicans and the Senate reject that, they actually said: This is stupid. I can't believe he would propose this. Those were the types of comments he got from his Senate colleagues for proposing a 1-year extension.

Right now, there is a 3-year discharge petition that would extend the tax credits for 3 years. I don't know if there are any Republicans who have signed on to that, but I think we have about 9 legislative days left. At least my kids were only in their early teens. However, if they want to do the big fixes they have been talking about with respect to healthcare, they are not going to be able to do it in 9 days.

Now, I know they are going to try and do something to save face, but at the end of the day, the extension is really the only realistic way we have to go here.

I have to say this: If they don't do the extension, it is going to be devastating for families across the country, millions of them.

We were talking a little bit about how much these things could cost. The HSA is a thousand-dollar average. Look at the average cost for heart surgery. Just the surgery, not even the stay, is between $30,000 and $200,000 just for the procedure. I don't even know how much my cancer surgery cost because I had health insurance. I didn't have to check it like that. We had to pay some deductible, but nothing dramatic. We wouldn't have been able to afford it. I wouldn't have gotten the surgery because I wouldn't even have known I had cancer because we wouldn't have gotten the MRI.

That is where we are putting the American people right now. Actually, not we, the Republicans are putting the American people right now.

It is time to end this. The clock is running out. The calendar says the time has come to do something and put some kind of proposal on the table.

I have to say this, too, on the proposal piece. When the Speaker passed the bill, I think it was, if I recall correctly, July 25th, we left town for the August recess, came back, passed the bill, and then left town again. There was a stretch there where I think we had been in session between July 25th and when the government finally reopened, I think it was 12 legislative days.

To my friends out there in the country, how many of you could only work 12 days in July, August, September, and October and still have a job and still get paid while you are out? That is what they did.

Mr. Speaker, the time has come to get this done finally, to make some kind of an effort to reach a bipartisan solution and resolve this crisis that was created entirely by my Republican colleagues, that was totally avoidable, that they decided to run into the fire anyway.

Let's fix this. Let's protect the American people. Let's allow them to go at least 1 year, maybe 3, so we can extend this so they can make sure that they continue to have healthcare coverage while we are working on this bill. Let's get it done.

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