Healthcare
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, in Texas, my constituents who are on the Affordable Care Act exchanges, otherwise known as ObamaCare, are experiencing an 18-percent increase in their insurance premiums. Now, if you look at employer-provided coverage, which covers many, many more Americans, those increases in costs are going up, roughly, in the 5- to 6-percent range. So you might wonder why the huge disparity between ObamaCare and the rest of healthcare.
Of course, our healthcare system is pretty fragmented. We have people who have employer-provided coverage, seniors who have Medicare, low- income individuals who qualify for Medicaid, veterans who qualify for the VA system, or TRICARE. But for the group of people who believed what President Obama said when he sold ObamaCare about 15 years ago now, they have been deceived.
I still remember like it was yesterday, the President said: If you like your policy, you can keep your policy.
That was a lie.
If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
Well, that was not true either.
Then he said that average premiums would go down about $2,500 for people on these Affordable Care Act exchanges. Well, that wasn't true either.
Years ago, I was attorney general of the State of Texas. We had a consumer protection division where we would sue people who would consciously defraud consumers, and if this isn't one of the biggest consumer frauds perpetrated in our lifetime--maybe in history--I don't know what is.
No Republican voted for ObamaCare as we didn't think that was the best solution to provide access to healthcare. Only Democrats voted for it. Now they have created this incredible mess--this unworkable, unsustainable, unaffordable healthcare system within the rest of our healthcare system. They look to us, the Republicans--the people who did not create this problem--and ask: OK. Now how are you going to fix it?
They don't have any better ideas. As a matter of fact, what they want is more of the same. They want zero reforms. They want more waste, fraud, and abuse. They want more money to go to insurance companies. They want 100 percent of the tax dollars that paid for the Affordable Care Act, or the ObamaCare exchanges, to continue going to insurance companies.
President Trump has said: Let's get the money to the consumers so they can choose what they want.
I think that is a better idea.
Plus, insurance companies skim about 20 percent off of those taxpayer-provided subsidies for their administrative costs and profits. And do you know what? Insurance companies are among the most profitable companies in America--certainly since ObamaCare started.
Then, finally, they want to break what has been, roughly--let me see--a 50-year consensus on whether tax dollars should be used to pay for abortions. We know that the issue of abortion divides much of America, but one area that we have agreed on is this consensus named after Henry Hyde, who was a famous legislator and House Member from Illinois. It is something called the Hyde amendment, which says that no tax dollars can go for abortions, and Democrats want to throw that out the window.
Well, rather than just point the finger at our Democratic colleagues, we actually have come up with a better idea, and I am grateful to our colleagues Senator Crapo, who is chairman of the Finance Committee, and Senator Cassidy, a medical doctor, who is head of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, for coming up with an alternative proposal that is predicted to bring premium prices down about 11 percent. Now, that is real money that people can use to spend on other things.
Again, an 18-percent increase each year after year, after year? This is a train wreck for people on these Affordable Care Act policies.
As I said, the proposal by Senator Crapo and Senator Cassidy aligns with what President Trump has said, which is, let's get the money to the people. Wouldn't you rather have the money to buy the kind of coverage that you want and need? We are not all the same. We have people of different ages with different healthcare needs. Some young and healthy people may figure they don't need as comprehensive a coverage as older folks do. But our Democratic colleagues believe that we are all cut out of the same cloth and that we are all the same when it comes to a need for healthcare, and it is just not true.
This legislation that has been proposed is not by the Democrats, who want more of the same--a broken system. The alternative that Senator Crapo and Senator Cassidy proposed, we voted on, and our Democratic colleagues did not support it at all. We sure didn't vote for this mess, what we call Dems' dirty ObamaCare bill. This is a disaster, and it was sold under false pretenses. We need to do better for our constituents who need access to affordable healthcare.
Well, our Democratic colleagues are calling for a clean extension of the enhanced ObamaCare subsidies because they don't want any changes in what I have described here, and that is the heart of the problem. We know there is a whole host of problems with this ObamaCare subsidy, and any extension that fails to address it is more apt to be described as what I would call a dirty bill. It doesn't solve the problem.
So what are the issues?
Well, first of all, we know that these subsidies are rife with fraud; in other words, your tax dollar is being misappropriated to fraudsters. We have been saying that all along.
Now we have a new report from the Government Accountability Office which demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt what we have always suspected to be true. They have documented it. The report paints a picture that makes the notion of a so-called clean extension, with no changes, outright laughable. That is not a clean extension.
The investigators at the GAO created fake identities and Social Security numbers for 24 individuals who did not exist. They did this in order to find out what would happen when they took advantage of these ObamaCare subsidies.
They took these imaginary 24 and tried to enroll them in Affordable Care Act plans through the ObamaCare exchanges for 2024 and 2025. Shockingly, they were able to successfully enroll almost all of these imaginary individuals in subsidized coverage because the insurance companies were more than happy to take those tax dollars in exchange for providing this phantom coverage.
For 2024, the auditors were able to secure health coverage for all four of the applicants submitted, worth approximately $2,350 per month. In 2025, 19 of the 20 applicants were able to qualify for subsidized coverage worth more than $10,000 per month--and these people didn't exist.
Of the 24 fake identities, 1 of them was not allowed to be enrolled. All the incentives for the insurance companies are: Let's issue the policy. We don't care if this is a real person or not. What we want is the premium dollar, and we want the taxpayer to pay for it.
The notion that someone can enroll in a taxpayer-subsidized health insurance policy with a nonexistent identity should be enough to stop us dead in our tracks and say: We need to change it. We need to fix this. But the fraud does not stop there.
GAO also found more than 29,000 instances in 2023 and nearly 68,000 instances in 2024 of a single Social Security number being used to enroll in more than 1 plan in a given year. So you had people with the same Social Security number able to enroll in multiple plans in a given year; meaning, these Social Security numbers were being traded and assigned to more than one person.
Again, all the incentives are for the insurance companies to issue as many policies as they can because that is how they make more money.
During its probe, GAO discovered that the Federal Marketplace does not prohibit multiple enrollments per Social Security number. So under the status quo, which Democrats want to continue, one person could enroll in multiple policies. Again, in some instances, they might not even know that they are enrolled in multiple policies.
The excuse given for this practice is it protects the Social Security number's holder from fraud or identity theft, but I am sure we could find a better safeguard against Social Security fraud than simply letting multiple people enroll in healthcare with the same Social Security number without raising any questions or any red flags.
So imagine if you were a victim of identity theft. Wouldn't you want to be notified if somebody was using your identity, your Social Security number, in order to get health insurance?
Democrats have been telling us, time and time again, that illegal immigrants cannot access taxpayer-subsidized healthcare. But we know from the GAO report that there are no mechanisms that prevent an illegal alien from enrolling in coverage if they have access to somebody else's Social Security number.
As if this isn't enough, the list of offenses go on and on and on.
In 2024, CMS reported approximately 275,000 reports from consumers that they were either enrolled or had made changes to their insurance without their consent. Now, this is a problem. If you are taking a medication or even if you have a particular doctor you like, having your plan change without your knowledge or consent could result in the loss of coverage altogether or force you to change doctors unnecessarily.
But this underscores one of the most significant problems that my Republican colleagues and I have raised with these so-called ObamaCare enhanced subsidies. They directly line the pockets of insurance companies without lowering the costs for consumers and taxpayers, and they do so in a way that is rife with fraud.
When insurance brokers are enrolling patients or making changes to their coverage without their consent, the insurance company receives those tax dollars for the enrollee. But since the patient doesn't--or may not--have knowledge that they have even been enrolled, or perhaps they are already enrolled in some other policy elsewhere, the insurance company will have to pay out zero in claims.
That is what insurance companies like. They like to collect the premium, and they like to pay as few claims as possible. So it is a perfect arrangement for them, but it is not for the taxpayer.
These ObamaCare-enhanced subsidies are rife with fraud and should not be extended without meaningful reforms. In addition, the problems raised by the GAO report, the subsidies don't contain Hyde protections. I mentioned that a moment ago.
People who have a conscientious objection to abortion policies shouldn't have to be forced, using their tax dollars, to subsidize it for people who want to fund abortions and transgender procedures.
Again, this used to be the 50-year-long consensus known as the Hyde amendment. Many hard-working taxpayers who elected us have religious or moral objections to these operations--myself included. And the government should not be forcing Americans to participate or subsidize practices that violate their deeply held beliefs by financing them with their tax dollars.
The Democrats' plan does nothing to address rampant fraud, the use of tax dollars to line the pockets of insurance companies, and the lack of Hyde protections in these subsidies. The lack of these changes does not mean this extension proposed by Democrats is clean--far from it.
We understand--I understand--that Texans need access to affordable healthcare, but this is not it. We look forward to working together to find a real workable solution to healthcare affordability.
What I worry about is that our Democrat colleagues really don't want to solve this problem. They want to have a political issue they can ride all the way to the midterm elections. That is not just a cynical view of mine, I think that is a very likely reality.
We can do better. We need to do better. Our constituents expect us to do better by working together to come up with affordable solutions for them without taking advantage of the taxpayers and lining the pockets of wealthy insurance companies.
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