Protecting Healthcare for Millions of Americans

Floor Speech

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Ms. HOYLE of Oregon. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. This has been a week. We invaded Venezuela; threatened to invade Greenland; put Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia on notice that they could be next; had the administration and many of my colleagues, who know better because they were here, try and rewrite the history of what happened on January 6; and an ICE agent shot and killed a woman in Minnesota, and DHS immediately blamed the victim with no pretense of wanting to find out what the facts were. An hour ago we just had two more people shot by an ICE agent in Portland, Oregon.

These are dark times, and it is really easy to get bogged down in the negative, but today, something really good happened. Mr. Speaker, today, 17 Republicans joined Democrats to override the Speaker's attempt to stifle the will of this body to vote to extend subsidies for the Affordable Care Act for 3 years.

My district is just over 17,000 square miles. It is mostly rural with rural hospitals hanging on by a thread. Some of them have just 15 percent commercial payer mix. Without the Affordable Care Act subsidies, we will have more uninsured people, and these hospitals could go under.

Prior to being in Congress, I worked at the United Way before the Affordable Care Act working on healthcare access, and my county had a 21 percent uninsured rate. We have a lot of farmers, small business people. We have people that couldn't afford insurance. Now our uninsured rate is just under 8 percent. That is because of the subsidies.

I have had people call me. One woman called and said she was paying $87 a month. She now will have to pay over $1,000 a month, and she can't afford her medication or the treatment that keeps her alive. I have people, small business people in my district, that are calling to say this is the first time they have ever had to go without insurance.

The fact of the matter is this is the right policy.

Now, if people want to talk about how to deliver quality, affordable, appropriate healthcare with less money going to hedge fund-owned medical practices or to insurance companies, I would love to work with my colleagues on that. We have a Medicare for All bill that anybody can get on. That is what we should be moving toward.

The bottom line is this: I remember when my mother, who was working as a contractor because her job got shipped offshore, didn't have insurance and she badly broke her leg, lost her home, went bankrupt, lost everything, and had to start over.

Many people in this country will lose everything. This is the right thing to do for right now, and then we should work together and be responsible as Congress to lower the cost of healthcare, take out the middleman, decrease the price of pharmaceuticals, and make sure that people have access to healthcare wherever they are in this country.

Mr. Speaker, I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to do that, and I encourage the Senate to take up this bill and get it done so that we can actually do what we got sent here to do, which is the work of the people.

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