FAA Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Improvement Act

Floor Speech

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Madam President, we are here today to debate the FAA reauthorization bill, very important legislation. It will create thousands of jobs and put in place the infrastructure for us to make sure we are competitive in the future.

It is disheartening to me that this bill has now been hijacked by a political debate, an amendment to repeal health care reform. Not every bill has to become political. Unfortunately, that is what we have today because we have an offer of an amendment to repeal health care reform. Let me speak to that amendment.

Last year, I watched as President Obama signed health care reform into law with a young man by the name of Marcelas Owens. He stood just a few feet away from the President. I met Marcelas a few months earlier at a rally in Seattle, and he told me a story that stayed with me throughout the health care debate. I want to mention it again.

Marcelas, a little boy, came up to me at this health care rally. He leaned in close to me and he said he wanted to tell me about his mom named Tifanny. She was a single mom, working hard. She got sick and lost her job. Because she lost her job, she lost her health care. Because she lost her health care, she lost her life. Little Marcelas looked up at me and said: Please don't let this happen to any other little boy. Please pass health care.

I was proud when that health care reform law was passed and is now working to make sure Marcelas and thousands of other little kids do not get into that terrible situation through which he has lived.

He was not alone. I heard from thousands of people from my home State of Washington who were demanding reform to the system we have. I heard from small business owners who wanted to cover their employees but they could not continue to do it because of the skyrocketing premiums. I heard from moms and dads who wanted to cover their children but they were getting rejected because their son or daughter had a preexisting condition. I heard from seniors who were desperate because they had fallen into the doughnut hole. They did not know how they were going to afford the drugs they needed to take so that they could have dignity of life in their senior years.

I heard from men and women in every part of my State, some barely holding on to their health insurance and a lot with no coverage at all. Each one of their stories had a common thread: The health care system we have in this country did not work for them. It failed their families one way or another, and they wanted it to change.

That is why I fought so hard with so many of my colleagues to reform that broken health insurance system, to fight for our families who needed help and were desperate and to level the playing field for people who needed a little bit of support.

We got that done for our families, and we can never go back. We cannot go back to a time when millions of Americans stayed up at night worrying about what would happen to them and their families if they lost their job and their health insurance; when insurance companies put unreasonable and unfair lifetime caps on coverage for our families; when women were not able to get equal access to coverage; when small businesses could not afford health care; and when so many seniors who could not afford it had to pay the full cost of expensive medications. We cannot go back to that situation.

My question for Republicans today is, why would they want us to?

The changes we made require insurance companies to cover preventive services with little or no cost sharing on the part of patients. It gives families access to new streamlined assistance to help them appeal services they have been denied or not covered adequately, something so many families got lost in prior to passage of this legislation.

It helps anyone who has ever been buried under a blizzard of forms from their insurance company and denials for coverage they need to have. It helps our small businesses to afford care for themselves and their employees who are now getting a tax deduction. As they fill out their forms, they say: I did not know this was in the health care bill. And we are going to vote to take that away?

I ask, why do Republicans want to take away the benefits as part of the business of the Senate as we just get started to get our economy back on track?

In my home State of Washington, the Republicans' plan would mean nearly 900,000 seniors who have Medicare coverage will be forced now to pay more for regular checkups and important preventive services. It would mean they will lose out on the 50-percent discounts on some of their prescription drugs. And it would mean that insurance companies would no longer be required to allow young people to stay on their policies until they are 26 and that, by the way, is going to be especially harmful now when so many of those young people today are having trouble finding a job.

Our families are depending on the changes we made within this health care reform law. It is why I supported reforming our health care system. It is why I fought so hard for so long to make sure it worked for our families and small business owners. And it is why I am going to keep fighting to make sure we do not go back to the way things were, that we continue to make progress and do this right.

I am happy to work with anyone--Democrat or Republican--to improve this law, but I will do everything I can to fight a full repeal that will devastate our families and small business owners across America. I urge my colleagues to vote no against this full repeal of health care reform.

One final point. We hear so many people talking about the deficit today and how important it is that we get our hands around the budget and our budget deficit. It is astonishing to me that this first amendment brought by the Republicans will cost our Federal Government $1.5 trillion and put us deeper into a deficit hole.

Progress is important. Getting our families back on track is important. Making sure that our economy is moving within the FAA bill we are talking about on the floor is important. And it is important that we continue to make sure the health care reform insurance system we put in place works for our families. That is what I will be voting on later today.

I yield the floor.

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