Providing Meaningful, Stable And Secure Health Insurance For All Americans

Floor Speech

Providing Meaningful, Stable And Secure Health Insurance For All Americans

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I'm glad to be here and I thank my friend from Florida for yielding.

This is an historic moment. It doesn't come around very often when you have the opportunity to make good on a promise that seemingly every President has tried to make good on, frankly, with a couple of Republicans thrown into the mix over the years, to bring health care out to the millions of people that don't have it. And as my friend Mr. Ryan said, we don't have a choice any longer. If we allow the status quo to continue, we're not just going to bankrupt every family and business out there, we're going to bankrupt our government.

The sad thing is that at this critical juncture in the history of American government, the history of the American health care system, you would like to think that the arguments that were happening on the floor of the House or in the Rules Committee where Mr. Pallone was all day or on the airwaves is a debate about what's best for this country. Instead, it seems that some of the debate is about what's best for one political party. This idea of the bill that we're debating being socialized medicine is laughable. It's laughable, but we have to talk about why we are hearing that phrase come up over and over again.

You have to go back to the spring of this year when the Republican Party's favorite pollster, Frank Luntz, came out with a memo, before the Democrats had even put their bill on the table, before there was a bill to critique, and the memo essentially said here's how you kill health care reform: You call it ``socialized medicine.'' You call it ``government-run health care.'' Before anybody had even looked to see what the bill was, the decision was made that for political purposes, a bunch of people are going to get behind killing this thing and they're going to call it these names no matter actually what's in the text.

Now, as it turns out, the bill that's presented before the House for a vote this weekend or early next week is so far from socialized medicine, from government-run medicine, to make that claim is absolutely outrageous. But if you make it over and over again and you get a few allies on talk radio and the cable news entertainment shows, the same people will start to internalize it.

The fact is that the Congressional Budget Office says pretty plainly that over the 10-year window of this bill's rollout, there will be more people, millions of more people, on private health care than there are today. Why? Because we fix the existing private health care market. We think that the salvation of our system can be the private market but not under the rules we're playing by today. Under those rules, the price of health care over the last 10 years has shot up by 120 percent for small businesses in my district. This year, our major insurer in Connecticut announced they were going to be raising rates by 30 percent in one single year for small businesses. The rules of this game have meant that millions of Americans are kicked off their health care just because they get sick and millions more can't get on health care because they were sick to begin with. The rules of this market don't work.

So all we say is let's set up some fair rules that aggregate the purchasing power of individuals, that don't deny health care to people that need it. Let's just fix the market. That's what this bill does. It fixes the market.

We are at the very last minute, Mr. Ryan, presented with an alternative bill from our friends. Now, you and I have been on this floor for a long time. We come down here and we talk about the differences between the Democrats' approach to health care and the Republicans' nonapproach to health care, but then over the last year we have talked about the places we agree on. And one of the places that we all thought we agreed on was that if you have a preexisting condition, you shouldn't be denied health care. I mean, I heard Republicans come down here night after night and say we should absolutely do that, and I listened to them on the talk shows and they said Democrats and Republicans should come together. We came down here on the floor and we wanted to lock arms and say you know what, let's do it. Let's stop sick people from being denied health care.

Then we see their proposal that they're apparently going to offer on the House floor as a substitute to the Democratic plan, and it does nothing for people that are sick and need health care. It doesn't even come close to banning the practice of insurance companies to deny coverage based on preexisting conditions.

So even the things that we thought we had agreement on we don't any longer, because when it comes down to it, the Republicans are more interested in preserving the profits of their friends in the health insurance industry, more concerned with stopping President Obama's quest to bring health care to Americans at a lower cost because it scores political points, Mr. Ryan.

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