National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012

Floor Speech

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Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, I come to the floor, as I have over the past year and a half, as a physician who has practiced medicine in Wyoming for a quarter of a century. I go home every weekend and visit with my former patients, my former colleagues. As I talk to people around the State of Wyoming about the newly passed health care law, their concerns are those we have heard from around the country and certainly those on the Senate floor. That is why I keep coming back to the Senate floor with a doctor's second opinion about the health care law.

What we know patients would like in terms of health care is that the care they get is the care they need from the doctor they want, at a cost they can afford. For many people across this country, a cost they can afford is a major issue, which is why I think so many people were happy to hear the President say, in his initial talk about what he was proposing for health care in this country, we need to get the cost of health care down. He said: If his bill were to pass and become law, the cost of care would drop about $2,500 per family across the United States. That is what people were looking forward to.

In so many ways, the President overpromised and underdelivered because what people have seen is the cost of their health care has continued to go up as a result of the President's health care law.

The States around the country are now looking at ways to deal with this health care law. Many States have set up committees to deal with it based on their State legislatures, and we have done the same thing in my home State of Wyoming. In Wyoming, we have asked for a study to be done to take a look at what the impacts of the President's health care law would be on health care and the cost of care in our State. A report was authored by a Massachusetts group called Gorman Actuarial. The report examined how the health care reform law passed last year by Congress is going to affect the State of Wyoming specifically. This information is being used in Wyoming by our Health Benefits Exchange Steering Committee. That is the committee which is reviewing various options for a State-run health exchange, and that is what people are looking at: What is the best thing to do for our State.

As they have come upon this work effort, what they are telling us is about the individual market for insurance--people who end up buying insurance individually because they don't get it necessarily through work; purchasing insurance in different ways, but they have to buy their insurance on the individual market. This report says that in Wyoming, as a result of the health care law, the current individual market enrollees will see average premiums increase by 30 to 40 percent based on the components of the law. Some supporters of the law say: Well, they are going to get more insurance than they would otherwise, and that is true because they are going to get a government-mandated amount of insurance which may be a lot more insurance than they want or need. That is one of the fundamental problems of this health care law, government-mandated levels of insurance. Many people in Wyoming feel they don't want that level of care, which is why I believe individuals should be able to opt out of this provision of the health care law. States ought to be able to opt out. States and individuals ought to be able to receive a waiver. But right now, that is not happening. So what we are seeing in Wyoming is a significant increase in the cost--not the decrease the President promised but an increase in the cost of health insurance beyond what it would have gone up had there not been a health care law at all.

I talk to young people around the State--and I met with a number of young people from my State just the other evening--and they ask about this and how it is going to affect the young. What we see is their rates are going to go up quite a bit. A lot has to do with the fact that there is--that the lowest amount they can end up charging someone who is young and then compare that to someone who is older, the ratio is 3 to 1. So for someone who is not very healthy and older, they will only be paying three times what a younger person will be paying based on what passed this House and this Senate. That means that for those younger people, they are going to pay a lot more than they necessarily would based on their own good health, exercise habits, fitness, diet, and in terms of what their real costs ought to be to be insured.

I guess it is not a surprise when we saw the election results coming out of the State of Ohio Tuesday a few weeks ago about the specific individual mandate that said everyone has to buy insurance. On that day, on election day in Ohio, 66 percent of the voters said they didn't want this government mandate, a mandate that people must buy government-approved insurance. They don't want that to apply to them. Two-thirds of the people in Ohio on election day voted against the mandate, which is not unusual to see because we have seen that across the country. We have seen that in Missouri last year on balloting day. We saw it in the new national polls.

This health care law is less popular now than it was the day it was signed. People continue to want to be able to get out from underneath the health care law. That is why I continue to come to the Senate floor week after week with a doctor's second opinion as more information becomes available, just as this study in Wyoming became available. The President's promise, ``If you like what you have you can keep it,'' we are finding out is not true, and the fact that the President promised health care premiums would drop for families by $2,500 per family is not true.

That is why I continue to believe this health care law is bad for patients, it is bad for providers--the nurses and the doctors who take care of those patients--and it is bad for the taxpayers of this great country. That is why it is time to repeal and replace this broken health care law.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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