Keep Student Loans Affordable Act of 2013 - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. BARRASSO. Madam President, last week our Nation celebrated America's Independence Day, and the Obama administration took advantage of the holiday to slip out a couple of announcements about its health care law. The first one came late one day as the media and most of the Nation were distracted by their plans for the Fourth of July. The administration finally had to admit to all of America that their health care law is unraveling before their eyes. Several months ago Senator Baucus predicted that the law was headed for what he called a train wreck, and last week we saw the train go off the rails. What happened was the Treasury Department put out a blog post, written by an assistant secretary late in the day on July 2, that said it would postpone the implementation of the employer mandate part of the health care law until 2015.

This was one of the signature parts of the President's health care law. Under the law, every employer with more than 50 people working 30 hours or more a week was going to have to offer expensive government-mandated health insurance. Now we have a 1-year delay of this extremely unpopular and damaging Washington mandate. Anytime you see the Obama administration leak news like that late in the day right before a holiday with the President out of the country, you can bet it is bad news for him and for them. Presidents do not delay things that are popular and that actually people want and like. When you see them try to hide it in a blog post, that is another sign. Here is what the New York Times said, front page:

Crucial mandate delayed a year for health law.

Large companies won't need to offer plans until 2015. GOP seizes on shift.

The Washington Post ran a headline, page 1:

Health-care rule is delayed a year. A setback for Obama law.

The Wall Street Journal said:

Health law penalties delayed.

The Obama administration has tried to hide its bad news, but it failed. It also tried to spin the collapse of one of the law's most important features as good news. But as we see it here, Washington Post, ``A setback for Obama law.''

The Treasury Department's blog post claimed it was implementing the law ``in a careful, thoughtful manner.'' If they were interested in careful and thoughtful, Washington Democrats never would have pushed through this reckless law in the first place, a law that many of them admit they never even read. Using that much Washington spin when it tries to sneak out bad news is another sure-fire sign that the White House is trying to hide the train wreck. The President and his supporters have been bragging about this part of the law for years. Now here they are quietly dropping it for a year and pretending things are going well for the law.

What does this announcement mean? First of all, this is a clear admission that the President's health care law is unaffordable, unworkable, and unpopular. Second, it may be too late. Here is a headline from CNN Money yesterday. They wrote:

For Fatburger and others, Obamacare delay came too late.

The article says for many small businesses such as fast-foot franchises, they have already begun adjusting to the law's burdensome requirements. One business owner said the delay won't help his employees. He said:

All it's doing is causing confusion, anxiety, and the workers are paying the price.

The workers are paying the price. Now the mandate's a moving target. It's very, very challenging.

For a lot of businesses, the adjustments they had to make included cutting back workers' hours. Let's look at the latest employment numbers released last Friday. In June, the number of people working part time--these are people who actually want to work more--soared by over 322,000. There are now 8.2 million Americans working part-time jobs because their hours were cut back or because they could not find full-time work. Republicans have been warning this would happen because of the Democrats' health care law and that is exactly what has been happening for months now. The White House admitted as much when it said employers needed relief from the logistical mess the law created.

If the law makes it so bad for businesses that they can't handle it in 2014, I will tell you it is still going to be bad for them in 2015. If it is bad for employers, it is going to be bad for men and women on the street, the hard workers of America. When do they get relief? Will the administration now postpone the requirements that every man, woman, and child in America has to buy expensive government-mandated insurance? I hope they do. You can bet labor unions and other special interest groups are going to step up their lobbying to postpone the parts of the law that hurt them. Even the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is asking for a waiver from portions of the law.

Let me be clear. I think it is a good thing for employers that they will not have to face this job-killing mandate next year, but why should they have to face it at all? Is the Obama administration finally seeing the light on what a disaster it will be to implement or is it another gimmick? Well, as Ronald Reagan once said:

They only come around on your side when they want to get their hands on your wallet.

This 1-year postponement is not a real solution. It is not designed to help job creators or taxpayers. It is designed to delay the train wreck until after the 2014 elections. This 1-year postponement, in my opinion, is a cynical political ploy to try to fool the voters one more time.

Don't just take my word for it, because CNBC asked Peter Orszag about it the other day. People know he headed President Obama's Office of Management and Budget in the President's first term. He was a big proponent and supporter of the law. He told CNBC that White House officials ``by definition,'' he said, thought that delaying the employer mandate would help them politically ``or they wouldn't have done it.''

``By definition,'' therefore, they thought it would help them ``or they wouldn't have done it.''

If they didn't expect it to help them politically, ``they wouldn't have done it.'' That is an incredible admission by a member of the Obama administration, his inside team. Just because the President thinks this is good for him politically doesn't mean it is good for the country.

On Friday, the Obama administration also tried to sneak out another admission that its health care law is not working. Remember, even though employers have another year before their mandate kicks in, all the people still have to buy expensive Washington-approved, Washington-mandated insurance and they have to do that by this upcoming January 1. To try to hide some of the costs, taxpayers are going to subsidize the higher premiums some people have to pay.

The Wall Street Journal just last Monday:

Insurance Costs Set For A Jolt. For the healthy, rates could soar under new law.

Insurance Costs Set For A Jolt.

To try to hide some of the cost, taxpayers are going to subsidize the higher premiums some people would have to pay, but the prices are going to go up so high subsidies may cover some but not all. If someone wanted the subsidy, the government, of course, will have to verify those people deserve the subsidy.

Not anymore, because now, under the administration's new policy, buried away in 606 pages of regulations, on Friday, they said nobody is going to check those answers.

In an editorial yesterday, the Wall Street Journal called these ``ObamaCare's liar subsidies.'' The paper agreed that managing the law's rules and regulations was complicated:

``Yet,'' the editors of the Wall Street Journal wrote, ``this is the system Democrats installed when they passed the law, which is not supposed to be optional due to administrative incompetence.''

Administrative incompetence is exactly what this is. It is also a recipe for rampant waste, fraud, and abuse. And it is an abuse in the taxpayer subsidies.

I have criticized the complicated process the administration was setting up to verify people's subsidy applications. That is because I think it is a tremendous example of government overreach and because Washington bureaucrats at the IRS and other agencies have shown they can't be trusted with that kind of information. The solution now, apparently, is to scrap the verification system. We should be cutting the cost of insurance. That is what people wanted. That is why we had health care reform, to get down the cost of care, not driving up the costs, giving subsidies to a select few people and giving Washington more power to watch over the whole system. The American people do not need to put off the wreck until the train goes around one more bend. They want to stop the train wreck from happening at all.

The American people want more than a temporary delay of one part of this terrible health care law. They want a permanent repeal of the whole thing. Now that the Obama administration has admitted its law is too complicated and would have too many negative side effects, it is time for it to set aside the political games and do what is best for the country. It is time to repeal this bad law and replace it with health care reform that will work.

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

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