Making Continuing Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, before I begin my other remarks today, I would like to say a few words about my friend, Arnold Garcia, who recently announced his retirement as editor of the Austin American-Statesman editorial page. During a time of political polarization in Washington, Austin, and other cities across the country, Arnold enjoys the respect and admiration of Republicans and Democrats alike.

He is a veteran of the United States Army and the Texas National Guard, and he spent 40 years at the Austin American-Statesman serving as head of the editorial page for more than 2 decades.

One of the most prominent and influential journalists in Texas, Arnold has a great love and respect for our state, his country, and the men and women who defend us. He is, by all accounts, a fair-minded reporter--which is saying something if you are in our business, because we know that there is a natural adversarial relationship between the press and elected officials. Everyone in Texas who knows Arnold agrees that he is a fair-minded reporter who has always made time to talk to almost anyone and has always had an open door for those who wanted to have a discussion on virtually any topic.

I wanted to say a few words today about Arnold Garcia.

Arnold, I salute your pioneering accomplishments. I thank you for all of these years of your friendship, and I wish you and your family nothing but the best in this next chapter of your life.

Mr. President, turning to the topic du jour, along with many of my Republican colleagues, I spent the past several days discussing all of the negative consequences of ObamaCare. I think it is important to remember that these are human consequences, not just about numbers.

When taxes and premiums rise, when doctors are forced to drop their patients, when people lose their preexisting insurance coverage, when full-time jobs become part-time jobs, and when our health care safety net is stretched to the breaking point, each has a profound impact on the lives of real people. That's especially true for the neediest and most vulnerable among us who rely on the safety-net programs that the President's health care law is further weakening.

To better appreciate the consequences of ObamaCare, we should consider the following questions:

Question No. 1: What does ObamaCare mean to a 28-year-old college graduate who can only find part-time work and living with his parents?

It means he will either pay higher insurance premiums or pay higher taxes, and it also means he will have a harder time finding full-time employment and starting a career.

Question No. 2: What does ObamaCare mean for a single mom who is insured with Medicaid--that safety-net program I was talking about?

It means that her family's primary insurance program, a program that is already broken--for example, in my State only one doctor out of every three will see a new Medicaid patient because it reimburses at such a low rate. So Medicaid is already failing to reliably deliver access to health care. With ObamaCare, and the dumping of millions of additional people into this broken program, it means this program will be flooded with millions of new beneficiaries, and it means Medicaid will soon be even less effective at delivering access to quality health care to the most vulnerable people in our society, the very people it was designed to protect.

Question number 3: What does ObamaCare mean to a 70-year-old retiree who is enrolled in Medicare?

It means that fewer and fewer doctors will accept him or her as a patient, because Medicare pays doctors at a fraction of what private health insurance pays in terms of reimbursements for their services. ObamaCare also means that unelected bureaucrats will soon be making decisions about whether they will get the care their doctor believes they need.

Question No. 4: What does ObamaCare mean for a working family that has been receiving employer-provided health insurance from their small business?

It means they very easily could lose their existing coverage and get dumped into an ObamaCare exchange. It also means they could very easily find themselves paying higher premiums for lower-quality insurance.

The final question I would ask is: What does ObamaCare mean for a small business owner with 49 employees?

It means they have a powerful incentive to stay below that 50-employee cap which would then kick them over into the employer sanction if they don't provide government-approved health care for all of their employees. So their incentive is to keep employment low and not hire anymore workers because of ObamaCare's extensive regulations and financial penalties.

As we think about each of these questions, we should also think about what business owners across America are telling us--I daresay all of them--about ObamaCare. For example, a small business owner named Linda Peters who runs a radio communications company in Anchorage, AK, recently said ObamaCare's health insurance tax ``hurts our future and threatens the stability of the small-business sector.''

In Arkansas, the owner of Little Rock Tours and Travel, a woman named Gina Martin has said, ``None of us really understand how we are going to continue to stay in business.''

In Louisiana, the owner of Dots Diner restaurant group, a gentleman by the name of Larry Katz recently told a Senate committee that he was being ``forced to put 16 people out of work just to save himself from the negative effects of [ObamaCare].''

In North Carolina, a franchise holder of the popular Five Guys burger chain, a man named Mike Ruffed, has estimated that ObamaCare will cost him roughly an additional $60,000 a year.

Each of the business owners I mentioned lives in a State with at least one Democratic Senator who voted for ObamaCare back in 2009. I want to emphasize once again that ObamaCare is not inevitable. Any law that Congress passes it can repeal, it can amend, and it can change.

The Members of this Chamber now have an opportunity to correct the mistake that the Senate Democrats made in 2009 when ObamaCare passed on a party-line vote. All the Democrats voted for it, and all the Republicans voted against it--including me. We now have an opportunity to stop this law before it does any more damage to people like those I mentioned and millions more across America.

To add insult to injury, yesterday we learned that the IRS has somehow misplaced $67 million that was allocated to the ObamaCare slush fund. I daresay, given all of the money being pushed into the implementation of ObamaCare, we can expect more stories like that in the weeks and months ahead, unless Congress acts.

As I said, I am proud to say I voted against ObamaCare 4 years ago because I simply did not see how it could possibly work. I was concerned about the higher taxes on hard-working American families such as my constituents in Texas. I was concerned about the command and control of Washington, DC, on all the health care decisions that should have been left to doctors, patients, and families trying to work together to determine what is in the best interests of those individuals and those families.

And, yes, I was concerned that the government would continue to cut reimbursements to providers which would make it more and more likely that fewer and fewer doctors and hospitals could actually see Medicare or Medicaid patients. I was concerned that ObamaCare represented a statement and an attitude that Washington knows best and that nothing anybody has done at innovative medical facilities around the country and in different States matters because Washington really knows best.

Many people had the audacity to say that even though ObamaCare was unpopular when it was passed, people would learn to love it--sort of like when Social Security and Medicare were originally passed.

Many of our Democratic colleagues who were responsible for giving us ObamaCare have what we don't have often in life, and that is a second chance. These Senate Democrats who voted for ObamaCare--having seen and heard the stories I just described--have a second chance to help save the American people from a looming disaster. When we have people like Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, on which I serve, telling Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of Health and Human Services, that the implementation of ObamaCare is like a train wreck, we ought to listen.

When some of the biggest cheerleaders for ObamaCare, such as organized labor, are now traveling to the White House and saying: Please, Mr. President, won't you give us a waiver or exemption because this is turning out different than you told us it would, we ought to listen.

Full-time work--the 40-hour workweek--is in jeopardy because in order to protect themselves from employer sanctions, employers are moving people from full-time work to part-time work--if they can hire people at all--which may be one reason why the labor participation rate, which is a percentage of Americans who are actually in the workforce looking for work, is the lowest it has been in the last 30 years.

As I said earlier, each of these stories is a human tragedy, and the stories behind the numbers tell a very sobering tale. But we are now powerless to deal with this looming disaster and impending train wreck, as Senator Baucus said.

I hope Senate Democrats will vote with Senate Republicans and take a stand, as we will have a chance to do, when we get a chance to vote to defund ObamaCare on the continuing resolution. If we do, we will be protecting the American people from one of the most unpopular, unworkable, and unaffordable laws in modern history.

I yield the floor.

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