Health Care

Floor Speech

Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, this week President Obama and his allies are launching a big summer push to convince people that his health care law will not be a train wreck. We have heard in the Senate from one of the authors of the health care law that he saw a train wreck coming, so now what we see is the Obama administration trying to actually sell the bill--not that it is good or bad, just trying to sell it in any way they can to make the American people think about it in ways that may change their minds.

The American people know this is a health care law that is not really doing what they want. What they are looking for is the ability to get the care they need from a doctor they want at a lower cost. That is far from anything the American people are going to see.

What we see today in Politico is the headline: ``Selling of ObamaCare Officially Begins,'' selling of the law that was passed. Not something that is good, just trying to sell the law itself.

The Washington Post this morning, ``Push is on to promote health law.'' The push isn't on to promote better care, not more affordable care; no, just to promote the law.

I believe it is going to be a tough sell. A new poll out earlier this month showed that only 37 percent of Americans think the health care law is a good idea. That is even fewer people than think it was a good idea when the law was passed 3 years ago.

Remember, the Democrats promised the American people that, well, the law would be actually overwhelmingly popular by now. That is nothing further from the truth because this law is more unpopular now than when it was passed.

We see the President of the United States pulling out all the stops trying to sell this horribly written law. This is a law that is bad for patients. It is bad for providers, nurses, and doctors who take care of those patients, and it is going to be bad for the American taxpayers.

What the President is doing is joined by a new interest group, and the group is called Enroll America. This is a group, and who is running it? Former Obama administration officials who moved from the White House to this group to try to sell this health care law. This is the group, part of what we have known as the Sebelius shakedown, the effort on the part of the Secretary of Health and Human Services who was asking health care businesses to donate to this organization. This group has started rolling out a PR campaign to try to convince people to sign up for insurance under the President's health care law.

I agree more people need insurance, but we have to make sure the people not just have insurance but get good care. This is what this is supposed to be all about. The President keeps talking about more coverage. What we need is care for people, not just more coverage.

Take a look at that and say: Is it actually going to work? According to the article in this morning's Washington Post, the President of this group, Enroll America, a former White House staffer, said yesterday in a telephone interview: The group's research shows that 78 percent of uninsured people don't know about the changes coming in January.

You have to say: What kind of insurance are people going to be able to sign up for? What are they going to get to choose from? What choices will they have? What will they find in the exchange?

By the way, the exchanges are running way behind time. This was a front-page story in one of the national papers today.

First of all, for a lot of people in terms of trying to sign up on the exchanges, what they are going to find is it is going to be a lot more expensive than it would have been for them if this health care law had never passed in the first place. Remember, the President said that policies would actually be $2,500 cheaper by the end of his first term. Now we are seeing policies actually a lot more expensive, not just by what the President promised but even more expensive than what they would have been had the law never passed in the first place.

Here is an editorial from the Racine, WI, Journal Times. This is how they put it the other day. They wrote:

Despite assurances from Democrats that the national health care plan will drive down health care costs--

The President's promise--

the evidence is increasingly telling the opposite tale.

This is Wisconsin. I mean, this is a State which has just recently elected a Democrat to the Senate, a State that went for the President.

Here is another headline that Enroll America will not be talking about when they try to cite the President's health care law. This is from the McClatchy news on Tuesday. The article is titled ``Obamacare's big question: What's it going to cost me?''

That is what people want. That is what they want to know. That is why folks were interested in the health care law in the first place: they were paying too much for health care and they needed and looked for care that was actually more affordable for them, right for them.

The writer from McClatchy, under this headline, ``Obamacare's big question: What's it going to cost me?'' writes: ``Early rate proposals around the country,'' around the country, ``are a mix of steep hikes and modest increases.''

Either way, insurance rates are going up everywhere; it is just a question of how fast and how high. So there is no surprise that the people across the country are disappointed and believe they have been misled by the President when he said rates will actually go down by $2,500 a family.

When we look at the States that have been putting out their numbers for next year, for a lot of people the answer to the question of what is going to happen to rates is they are going up very fast and very high.

In Ohio, the average individual market health insurance premium next year will be 88 percent higher than this year. That is according to the State insurance department. That is the State's official numbers.

In California, for a typical 40-year-old man who doesn't smoke, rates in an insurance exchange will increase by 116 percent next year.

The McClatchy article also quotes one health care expert saying that under the President's health care law there are winners and there are losers.

I agree; that is absolutely right. There are winners and there are losers. We will talk about some of them this morning. The problem is the President and Democrats in Congress who pushed this health care act into law never said, never admitted to the American people that they were going to be losers.

Enroll America is telling everybody to sign up for health insurance, but they aren't admitting that the law picked who wins and who loses. Let's take a look at that. It is another important point in this health care law, what is going to happen and what this new insurance is going to look like. It is going to be loaded onto the backs of young people. Under the law, many young people, many young, healthy people will have to pay a lot more for each older, sicker person who will pay less. For the President's scheme to work, these young healthy people will have to buy high-priced, government-mandated insurance they may not need, they may not want, and that may not be right for them.

Here is another point about what Enroll America is telling people and what it is not telling people about the new Washington-mandated insurance. This group put up a blog post recently talking about ways States can maximize their Medicaid enrollment. This is one of the strategies Enroll America is pushing: get people signed up for Medicaid. A Medicaid card doesn't ensure patients actually get access to quality medical care for themselves or their families.

According to one survey, one-third of physicians nationwide are unwilling to accept new Medicaid patients. Other studies have concluded that some patients in the Medicaid system do worse in terms of health care than people who have no insurance at all. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that the health care law will put another 13 million people into the broken and failing Medicaid Program.

Even with the enormous expansion of Medicaid, even after a Washington mandate that everybody in America must purchase health insurance, and even after Enroll America's big push to sign up more people, the Congressional Budget Office, the people who research this, who study this, say the number of uninsured Americans will never fall below 31 million. It will not fall below 31 million people even over the next decade.

In spite of all of this revamping of a health care system, significant changes--much to the detriment of the American people because the President was focused on coverage--he is still leaving 31 million people uncovered and others paying much more. There are winners and losers, lots of losers.

This law will cost $1.8 trillion over the next decade according to the CBO. It still fails to help millions and millions and millions of Americans.

Then the question is who is actually being helped by the law because, as I said, there are going to be winners and losers. The Wall Street Journal, just the other day, page B1, Monday, June 17, ``Wanted: Health-Care Legal Experts.'' Legal experts. The lawyers are turning out to be winners under the health care law--not the patients, not the providers, not the taxpayers, the lawyers. The article says:

Some companies are warning that President Barack Obama's health-care overhaul will cost jobs. It won't be in their legal departments.

The article continues:

Health-care companies racing to go comply with the Affordable Care Act and other rules are calling in the lawyers, sparking a mini-boom for specialist attorneys who can backstop overloaded internal teams and steer clients through an increasingly crowded regulatory minefield.

The point of the health care reform should be to help the American people, not just to create more jobs for lawyers. The point should be to increase access to care for people, not just to send them Medicaid cards and tell them they are covered. The point of reform should be to help people get the care they need from the doctor they choose at a lower cost.

President Obama doesn't want to talk about the ways his health care law picks winners and losers. He doesn't want to talk about the many losers under his plan. Enroll America doesn't want to level with the American people to tell them the health insurance they get under the President's law might not be what is best for them.

If we are going to truly reform our health care system in this country, the President and his allies should start by telling the American people how his law falls short.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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