Two Years Later, Health Care Law's Broken Promises Continue

Floor Speech

Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, today the Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments on the constitutionality of the President's health care overhaul, the so-called Affordable Care Act of 2010.

While the Court is still months away from this decision, in many ways the verdict has already been cast by countless American families and small businesses negatively impacted by the law.

In 2007, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested: ``We have to pass the bill so you can find out what's in it.''

Two years since passage, American families have found out the hard way with increased taxes, looming regulations, and a slew of broken promises from fictitious cost controls to limitations on consumer choice.

Most recently, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office served a devastating blow to President Obama's most frequently used tagline: ``If you like your present coverage, you can keep it.''

The CBO report suggested there will be a net loss of employer-based insurance coverage between 3 and 5 million people per year from 2019 to 2022. This has the potential for 20 million Americans to lose their insurance coverage over just a 4-year span.

On the first anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, I joined the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee for a congressional field hearing in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in order to review the law's impact throughout the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. During the hearing, Pennsylvania's acting insurance commissioner, Michael Consedine, testified that new mandates on insurance coverage had resulted in premium increases of up to 9 percent.

These figures mirror the national trend as outlined in a recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The Kaiser report shows that the average annual premium for family coverage through an employer reached $15,073 in 2011, an increase of 9 percent over the previous year. This is a far cry from Barack Obama's 2008 proposition that his law would cut family premiums by $2,500 before the conclusion of his first term in office.

President Obama had also promised that he will not sign a health care plan that adds one dime toward deficits either now or in the future. However, an honest accounting of the health care law finds that it will increase the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars in the first 10 years alone.

Former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin has testified the law will increase the deficit by at least $500 billion in its first 10 years and more than $1.5 trillion over the decade thereafter.

At a time of severe budgetary constraints, there's only one place to turn in order to keep up with this spending: the wallets of Americans, in the form of tax increases.

Having spent almost 30 years in the nonprofit health care field, I am acutely aware of the challenges many face when it comes to obtaining reasonably priced health care.

While many of us agree there are portions of the law that are beneficial, such as the ability of adult dependent children up to age 26 to stay on their parents' insurance, the elimination of excluding those with preexisting conditions from the plan and the expansion of low-cost clinics into underserved areas, the approach of the Affordable Care Act is fundamentally flawed. The law places Uncle Sam between doctors and patients when it should be the American people, not Washington bureaucrats, determining the kind of health care coverage that best suits their needs.

Over the past 2 years, as the regulations have rolled out and the American people continue to learn what really is in the law, the broken promises have continued to pile up, weighing on the backs of small businesses and families. That's why we must repeal the law and toss out the negatives; move forward with reforms that actually lower costs without sacrificing quality and liberty.

This week, just blocks away from this Chamber, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the constitutionality of this law. While the Court's decision is months away, the verdict has already been cast by the countless American families and small businesses in congressional districts across this great country that simply cannot afford the so-called Affordable Care Act.

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