Protecting Access to Healthcare Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. DOGGETT. I thank the gentleman.

Many an American family has been wrecked by soaring health care costs. We know it's been a leading cause of personal bankruptcy. We know that spiraling health care costs have been a leading cause of credit card debt, and now Republicans have continued their sustained effort to wreck the Affordable Care Act.

As we have been witnessing at the same time that this debate is going on within the Budget Committee, on which I also serve, the Republican plan to end the guaranteed benefits of Medicare, they think that our seniors pay too little, so they offer a voucher plan that would result in our seniors having to pay much more for their health care. They would tell the senior or the individual with disabilities, Go out and fish for insurance with this voucher. But they won't find any fish biting, though they will continue to be bitten with rising health care costs. That's why President Lyndon Johnson created Medicare in the first place, because private insurance companies weren't interested in covering the old and the infirm.

Today's approach is the same approach that Republicans took last year when they had their signature accomplishment. Right in the first month of their takeover of this Congress, they came out here with this page-and-a-half bill that I call the ``12 platitudes.'' They repealed what they said they didn't like, and they came forward with 12 lines of what they said they would replace the Affordable Care Act with. But all we've gotten since then are bills that began after they did the total repeal--repealing individual sections, like school health care clinics, like this proposal dealing with the question of health care costs.

We know they don't like it. We know they don't like President Obama and anything that he is for. They tell us everything that is wrong with the Affordable Care Act, but they sure can't come up with a better idea that they have the courage to bring to a vote in the Ways and Means Committee or bring to a vote on the floor of this House. It's all about what they're against, but they haven't brought any of the 12 platitudes that they approved last year into a legislative form to deal with this issue of spiraling cost for our government and families or to deal with any other aspect in the Affordable Care Act.

Now, I have to say, quite frankly, that I wish the Affordable Care Act were as good as they think it is bad. It's not. It is a compromise of a compromise--it has many inadequacies--but compared to the Republican alternative of doing nothing and compared to the broken health care system that has wrecked so many American families who are faced with a health care crisis, this approach is far superior.

This board's opponents tell us that Congress should be able to make all these decisions. Well, I've served on the Ways and Means Committee and on the Health Subcommittee previously for a number of years. I wish it could be so, and I think we could play a more constructive role. But, frankly, the history is that Congress hasn't done a very good job of controlling costs. When we have taken steps to control costs, as we did with the $500 billion in cost control that we put into the Affordable Care Act that increases the solvency, extends the solvency of the Medicare trust fund by 12 years, all we've gotten is attack and criticism from them for the steps that we took that did limit cost.

So I don't view this aspect of the Affordable Care Act as necessarily the best way to do it or the only way to do it. But when all they offer us is nothing except vouchering Medicare for our seniors and similar, I think we should stick with the reform that we have until a better alternative is presented, and that alternative is not being presented tonight.

Republicans don't have a plan to make the hard decisions to lower health care costs. They just want our seniors, individuals with disabilities, and families across America to pay more so that they can preserve all these tax breaks for the wealthiest and most economically successful people in our society and, for all of those corporations that export jobs abroad, to continue to provide them incentives to do just that.

I believe that this bill should be rejected just like their other repeal efforts until they come up and present on the floor a better idea, and I don't think they have one. They just have all the retreads of the Bush-Cheney years. Until then, I say stick with the Affordable Care Act.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source