Repeal of Obamacare Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.
What we're engaged in here in the House of Representatives right now is a total waste of taxpayer money. It's no wonder the American people think so little of this institution. We are now on our 31st effort in this House to repeal all or part of ObamaCare. We have not yet voted once on the President's jobs bill, which he presented last September.
Two numbers. Thirty-one; that's the number of times this House will now have voted to repeal ObamaCare. Zero; that's the number of times that we voted on the President's jobs bill.
I've been listening to this debate this afternoon and we've heard the same old, tired misrepresentations and distortions that we heard the first time around: Government takeover of health care. In the year 2010, PolitiFact rated that the Lie of the Year. And it just goes on and on and on like whack-a-mole.
The American people do not want to relitigate this issue. What the American people want us to do is focus on jobs and the economy. Let's get on with that business.
I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, it's quite a scene to see so many of our colleagues rush to the floor of this House to call upon this Congress to deny the American people health care protections, patient protections, that every Member of this Congress has. If the child of a Member of this Congress has preexisting conditions, whether it's diabetes, whether it's asthma, their child gets covered. If their child is 25 years old and didn't happen to have health insurance, they can be covered on the health insurance plan. And yet this bill to repeal ObamaCare would deny to the American people the same kind of patient protections that every Member of this Congress enjoys.
It's a sad day.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman who just spoke, the gentleman from Oklahoma, called this bill unaffordable. We heard the debate a little bit earlier about what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said about this bill, the Affordable Care Act.
They say if you repeal the Affordable Care Act, it will increase the deficit over the next 10 years, and it will increase it by over $1 trillion in the second 10 years. Yet, we have this bill on the floor today without even a fresh Congressional Budget Office estimate. So nobody knows how those numbers may or may not change.
What we do know is that the last assessment that they give us is that the action that our Republican colleagues are proposing today would increase--increase--our national deficit. That is not fiscal responsibility.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Speaker, just to respond to my friend, the chairman of the Budget Committee, with respect to the CBO estimate, if it was true that over the 10-year period you had tax revenue loaded in the way that would sort of so-called deceive the impact of the deficit, it would stand to reason it would get worse over the second 10 years. In fact, the deficit savings, in other words, the reductions to the deficit, is greater over the second 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, than the deficit reduction over the first 10 years. And if you repeal the bill, as the Republicans are proposing to do today, you will not only add to the deficit in the first 10 years, but you'll add even more to the deficit over the 20-year period.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Speaker, I think this whole conversation about tax or a penalty has gotten us a little bit into the silly season. If you go to the State of Massachusetts Web site and you look at the RomneyCare plan, what they say is that if you're able to afford insurance but decide not to get it, you will pay a penalty collected through the tax system--a penalty collected through the tax system.
ObamaCare is modeled on RomneyCare. And as Governor Romney understood at one time, if you say to people who can afford health insurance, it's okay that you don't get it; just show up at the hospital and everybody else will pay your bill through their higher premiums or taxpayers who have to pay uncompensated care to hospitals, that's free-riding on the system. That's freeloading on the system. That's saying to every other person, every other taxpayer that other people should be responsible for paying for the health care bill of the person who chooses not to get health care coverage.
Yes, if you can afford health care coverage but you decide to free-ride on other people, then there's a little penalty under this bill just as there is under Governor Romney's proposal--a proposal, by the way, that was once widely supported by our Republican colleagues when they talked about the importance of personal responsibility and the importance of making sure that people who are going to use the health care system took some responsibility for paying for their health care system.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Speaker, during the debate over passage of the health care bill, ObamaCare, we heard a campaign of massive distortions. We heard it was going to create death panels--not true. We heard it was going to be a government takeover of health care. The independent PolitiFact called that the 2010 lie of the year. Now we hear it's going to wreak havoc on the economy, when the head of the Congressional Budget Office, our nonpartisan referee, just said 2 weeks ago that they don't think this bill's having any significant impact on the economy. And on and on and on.
We heard from our Republican colleagues they were going to repeal and replace. We've now repealed this 31 times in the House--no replacement.
And what does that mean? That's the status quo. Our colleagues make it sound like the status quo is just great in the health care system when the insurance companies got to run the show, when they got to deny kids coverage even if they had asthma or diabetes and preexisting conditions, when they got to say you're not covered if you're 22 years old, you can't stay on your parents' health care bill, when premiums doubled between 2000 and 2006 while insurance company profits quadrupled. That's what the Republicans are proposing to go back to.
We continue to hear this distortion about Medicare. The reality is that we reduce some of the big taxpayer subsidies to the private Medicare plan. Some of them were being subsidized 140 percent of fee-for-service; average subsidy, 114 percent. We used some of those savings to eliminate the prescription drug doughnut hole that seniors fell into, to eliminate many of the copays for preventive care services.
Now, the Republican budget that every Republican in this House has voted for, that Mitt Romney has endorsed, they took all that $500 billion in savings, every penny. But you know what? They didn't plow one penny back into strengthening Medicare benefits. They would reopen the prescription drug doughnut hole.
So that's what this debate is all about, trying to make sure that we provide the best health care we can at the best price. And to witness this effort to deny patients across this country the same kind of patient protections that Members of this Congress have, I think, is something that the American people, when they focus on this, as they clearly are, will clearly reject.
What we should be doing, instead of taking away from millions of Americans the kind of patient protections that Members of Congress have, what we should be doing is focusing on jobs and the economy. And it is a shame that, as we're going to vote tomorrow for the 31st time to repeal ObamaCare, we haven't had a single vote on the President's jobs initiative, an initiative that he brought before this body last September. He was at the podium where the presiding officer stands now. He asked Congress to pass his jobs initiative. Not a single vote on that, and yet here we are, our 31st vote to repeal the kind of patient protections that Members of Congress enjoy, repeal them for the American people.
So, Mr. Speaker, I hope that our colleagues will reject this effort. I know the American people have already made it clear through their voices and their response to surveys that they want to move on. They want to move on. They want to deal with jobs, and they want to deal with the economy, and they want to end the political charades.
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