Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act of 2013

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, our friends on the other side of the aisle keep promising that once the President's health care law is fully implemented it will deliver fabulous results. Unfortunately, they have a massive credibility problem. Indeed, despite all the promises made to the American people during the debate and passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2009 and 2010, every week brings more evidence the President's health care law is, No. 1, already discouraging full-time job creation; No. 2, destroying many existing full-time jobs; No. 3, hampering medical innovation; and No. 4, encouraging further executive branch overreach.

And of course the worst is yet to come because, amazingly enough, once this law was passed in 2010, it wasn't implemented before the 2010 mid-term elections, nor was it implemented fully between then and the 2012 Presidential election. So the American people have yet to feel the full force of the implementation of ObamaCare, even though what we see already is discouraging, to say the least.

Once ObamaCare is fully implemented, it will drive up individual insurance premiums. We have already seen some indication of that around the country in the rates that have been announced for the individual exchanges that have been created. That is because of phenomena such as the guaranteed issue and age banding, which basically have engineered the insurance industry so that it no longer is insurance but prepaid health care.

Secondly, it will cause millions of Americans to lose their current coverage. Remember when the President said: If you like what you have, you can keep it? That is proving not to be true.

Thirdly, it will weaken Medicare and Medicaid.

My colleagues may recall that during the 4th of July recess the administration announced it would not be confirming taxpayer eligibility for the ObamaCare premium subsidies until 2015, even though the subsidies will begin flowing--taxpayer dollars will be flowing--1 year earlier in 2014. In other words, for 1 year, under the administration's current plan, people will be able to get taxpayer dollars without any independent verification of what they are representing in terms of their eligibility for those tax dollars. That is correct, without any independent verification--no safeguards for overpayments or fraud.

Earlier today the House of Representatives passed legislation that would delay the ObamaCare premium subsidies until the administration establishes a system for verifying eligibility, to make sure those tax dollars are not stolen or obtained under false pretenses.

It is one of those measures that should be a no-brainer. After all, whatever one thinks about health care reform, everyone should want to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse. Yet our colleagues on the other side of the Capitol, House Democrats, were almost unanimously opposed to the No Subsidies Without Verification Act, and the majority leader in this body refuses to allow a vote in the Senate on similar legislation.

Again, this is what one outside of Washington and the beltway would think is a no-brainer, but here we have an alternate universe, apparently. Apparently, our Democratic friends are okay with that, but I certainly am not, and neither are the 26 million people in Texas I have the privilege of representing.

At a time when the Federal Government is almost $17 trillion in debt, shouldn't we be doing everything humanly possible to try and crack down on wasteful spending and fraud? Well, I would think so. But here is yet another question: Wasn't ObamaCare itself sold on the basis it would reduce health care fraud? Wasn't it supposed to improve oversight? That is what we were told during 2009 and 2010. Apparently those promises have now been forgotten.

If the President and his allies are wondering why they have such an enormous credibility gap on ObamaCare, the answer is actually quite simple: So many of the promises that were made in selling ObamaCare have simply not been kept. It is simply not performing as advertised.

Think about what we have learned in the last few months alone. In July, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a study showing ObamaCare may cause substantial declines in aggregate employment. In other words, unemployment will go up and the number of people getting work will go down. That same month, the Wall Street Journal reported that between 2009 and 2012 the number of doctors opting out of Medicare nearly tripled.

In my State, if you are covered by Medicare you might find a doctor who will take a new Medicare patient and you might not. Only about two-thirds of Texas physicians will take a new Medicare patient because the reimbursements have been slashed to the point where many doctors simply can't economically take a new Medicare patient. This is like the old shell game where people are told they have coverage but they can't find a doctor willing to see them based on that coverage.

The problem for Medicaid is even worse. In mid-August the University of Virginia announced that ObamaCare is projected to add $7.3 million to the cost of the university's health plan in 2014 alone. That is just at the University of Virginia. About a week later, National Journal reported that for the vast majority of Americans, premium prices will be higher in the individual exchanges than they are paying currently for employer-sponsored benefits.

I have two daughters in their early thirties. They are the ones, under ObamaCare, who are going to have to bear the financial burden for subsidizing the health care costs for older Americans, and it is unfair. This is the very same cohort of the population that is finding it harder to find jobs and finding the burdens of our broken entitlement programs are going to be visited upon them, not to mention their share of the Federal debt, which boils down to about $53,000 each. If I were a 30-year-old or 30-something, I would be pretty irritated at my elders for not being responsible and pushing that debt and those responsibilities on me--if I were them.

Last week Investor's Business Daily reported that ``more than 250 employers had cut work hours, jobs, or taken other steps to avoid ObamaCare costs.'' We heard a lot about this, including from some of the largest labor unions in the country, saying many employers, in order to avoid the employer mandate and other mandates associated with ObamaCare, were simply taking full-time jobs and turning them into part-time work, obviously resulting in people taking a cut in their income.

A few days ago, a local media outlet in Michigan reported ObamaCare will cost the medical device company Stryker ``fully 20 percent of its total research and development investments.'' This has to do with the medical device tax which is part of the way ObamaCare was paid for and which punishes medical device companies. These companies create jobs here in the United States. They create new and innovative medical equipment that helps improve outcomes and makes our lives better. Yet they are being targeted under ObamaCare with this medical device tax and it is chasing jobs overseas and stifling innovative medical research.

In addition, the Huffington Post has reported the Trader Joe's grocery chain will be dropping health insurance coverage for all employees who work fewer than 30 hours a week.

As I said, we have seen some of our organized labor unions, particularly the one representing IRS employees that announced it does not want its members to receive health insurance through ObamaCare exchanges, even though, under ObamaCare, the IRS will be implementing the exchanges for everyone else, as well as the individual mandate. In other words, the very people responsible for administering ObamaCare want no part of joining the exchanges, and that should speak volumes to all of us.

The truth is it wasn't supposed to be this way. Whether you were one of the most ardent advocates for the Affordable Care Act or whether you were a skeptic, such as I, who didn't believe it could work, I think the facts are undeniable. The Affordable Care Act was supposed to help the middle class, not cut their work hours and threaten their benefits. It was supposed to help young people, not drive up their insurance premiums. It was supposed to help medical innovation, not lead to factory closures and cancellations. And it was supposed to help make Medicaid stronger, not overload a broken system. It was sold on the basis it would strengthen Medicare, not trigger an exodus of doctors from seeing Medicare patients.

My point is: Whether you were one of the most ardent advocates or whether you were a skeptic, ObamaCare is not living up to the hopes and the promises made by its biggest fans, and we should work together to try and find a way to deal with that in a responsible way.

One final point. The President has apparently decided ObamaCare says whatever he wants it to say. For example, he has unilaterally delayed both the employer mandate and the eligibility verification I spoke about a moment ago simply because it has proven to be politically inconvenient. Many of my constituents are outraged at this and wonder how a law that applies to everyone in America can be enforced on a piecemeal or cherry-picked basis. My only explanation to them is the President controls the executive branch of government, including the Department of Justice. Congress has no authority to enforce these laws, only to pass the laws, expecting the executive branch will administer the laws and enforce the laws as written. But that hasn't happened. Meanwhile, the IRS has announced it will violate the text of the law and issue health subsidies through Federal exchanges, even though the law clearly states those subsidies can only be issued through the State exchanges.

Here again is another example in this case of the IRS rewriting the law where it proves to be convenient to achieve a particular outcome. This should be and is an outrage. Indeed, on issues ranging from the tax subsidies to the employer mandate, ObamaCare has effectively become government by waiver.

There is no way to sugarcoat it. The law is damaging our economy, damaging our health care system, and weakening our constitutional checks and balances and our legacy of being a Nation of laws, not of men. That is why the best course of action, I believe, is to delay ObamaCare, dismantle ObamaCare, and replace ObamaCare.

I have cosponsored legislation numerous times that would delay both the employer and individual mandates, for example. It was introduced last night, the latest version, as an amendment to the current energy efficiency bill. My ultimate goal is to replace ObamaCare with patient-centered reforms that do several important things we could all, hopefully, agree are important principles for whatever our health care system is.

First of all, a replacement would make sure a health care system is in place where price and quality information is fully transparent and readily available. That is so people can compare and shop and use the market system to make sure people who provide those goods and services do so at as low a price and at as high a quality as they can get.

A replacement system would include a Tax Code that treats individually purchased health insurance the same way as employer-provided health insurance.

A replacement system would make sure every American is protected against catastrophic expenses.

This is one of the phony ways I have heard people talk against this idea. They say: Well, if you replace ObamaCare, you will eliminate the system against dealing with people with preexisting conditions. That is false. That is not true. You don't need this behemoth legislation that costs $2.7 trillion--or whatever the final figure is--in order to deal with people with preexisting conditions. What we can do is simply help fund the State-based insurance exchanges that provide coverage to people with preexisting conditions at a far cheaper price and still accomplish the same goal.

So anyone who tells you we have to have ObamaCare to deal with preexisting conditions is trying to sell you a bill of goods.

We should have a system replacing ObamaCare that gives all Americans an opportunity to save money in tax-free health savings accounts so they can use that money to pay for their health bills. If they don't need the money for that purpose, they can save it like an IRA or some other savings account tax free.

We should have a replacement system where the States will have much greater flexibility in improving Medicaid. We would be happy in Texas for the Federal Government to write us a check for its share of Medicaid and let us administer it in a much more cost-effective and a much higher quality sort of way.

We need a system to replace ObamaCare that protects Medicare for future generations and a system that preserves the right for the most important decisions about medical care to be left to patients and their physicians.

I remain confident that someday we can make this kind of health care system a reality. First, we need to delay if we can't replace it now. Certainly, as ObamaCare starts crumbling in on itself, we need to protect the American people from this catastrophic and epic failure and provide an alternative that has the sort of qualities I have described a moment ago--which will make sure that people have access to quality health care at an affordable price in a way that doesn't let Washington interfere with doctor-patient relationships or decisions we ought to reserve to ourselves and our families when it comes to our health care.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

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