Drug Quality and Security and Act - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. THUNE. Madam President, the question of the week is, more important than apologizing, will President Obama live up to his promise that Americans can keep the care they have and like? Democrats are clearly running away from embracing this law and are suggesting the President live up to his promise as well. Yesterday former President Clinton said:

I personally believe, even if it takes a change to the law, the President should honor the commitment the Federal Government made to those people and let them keep what they got.

That is from former President Clinton yesterday in a interview he did.

More and more we see people on the Democratic side of the aisle coming forward, acknowledging what many of us have been acknowledging for a long time; that is, this is not living up to expectations. We need a timeout. It is clearly not working, it is not ready for prime time, and it is obvious that we need to acknowledge that and come up with plan B.

Senator Durbin, here in the Senate, said in an interview Tuesday that the cancellations of their coverage that people might face under ObamaCare and the statement that people could keep their plans ``should have been clarified.''

Democratic Representative Kurt Schrader from Oregon thinks the President was grossly misleading to the American public and said:

I think the President was grossly misleading the American public.

Senator Feinstein, who is not up for reelection, is supporting legislation to allow individuals to maintain enrollment in the plans they like.

These mistruths are clearly affecting the President's credibility. President Obama's approval ratings have dipped to a record low. A poll from Quinnipiac University that was released shows respondents disapprove of the President's job performance by a 54-to-39 margin. His approval rating of 39 percent is worse than his previous alltime low of 41 percent in the Quinnipiac survey done previously. Further, more people--52 percent--say the President is not honest and trustworthy.

We are on the verge of another misstatement from this administration where they make promises to the American people that they do not meet. Last month the administration promised they would have healthcare.gov fixed by the end of November.

It appears unlikely, according to today's Washington Post, where a headline reads: ``Troubled HealthCare.gov unlikely to work fully by end of November.''

For proof that this Web site design has been a failure of leadership, compare it to Cyber Monday volume at amazon.com in 2012. According to amazon.com's press release, it sold 27 million items on Cyber Monday, or 306 items per second. That is how the private sector has been able to process huge volumes of data and requests. If we compare and contrast that with the rollout of ObamaCare and healthcare.com, it is a stunning failure--even epic in terms of the inability of that whole program to function with any level of competence.

It is clear that technology exists to fix the Web site to handle high volumes, but, as the President has said, the health care law is more than just a Web site, and that is where most of us come down on this issue. This is a flawed policy that is causing millions of Americans to lose the health care they like. Most of us know someone who has had his or her health care canceled by ObamaCare, and it is going to get worse. The Associated Press reports that at least 3.5 million have received cancellation notices, and that number is expected to increase to tens of millions of people. As Americans--millions more--are losing their plans, only thousands are signing up through ObamaCare.

Constituents are encouraged to visit our Web site at republican.senate.gov/yourstory to submit their stories about how this is impacting them personally. The American people deserve to have their stories heard, and Americans deserve to have the President and congressional Democrats keep their promise.

We believe what former President Clinton said yesterday is correct; that is, President Obama should honor the commitment the Federal Government made to those people and let them keep what they have. That is essentially where we are today. I would simply ask rhetorically, what is the President going to do to address and honor the promise he made to the American people that they can keep what they have?

Increasingly, more and more Democrats--and, of course, there are many of us on this side of the aisle who predicted this would happen a long time ago--realize this was an ill-conceived policy. I have maintained for a long time that it was built upon a faulty foundation; therefore, you cannot just fix a Web site or have an IT specialist come in and expect this to get better. This is a flawed policy, and it is already having profound and harmful impacts on the American people. We believe many more people will be harmed in the future as the insurance is fully implemented.

The best we can do for the American people in order to minimize the impact and harm is to put off, suspend, delay--whatever you want to call it--the implementation of ObamaCare. Frankly, the best we could do in the long run is pivot away from this failed policy and move in a direction that actually does address some of the fundamental problems we have with health care in this country today.

There is a whole list of solutions Republicans have advanced and put forward in the past--for example, allow people to buy insurance across State lines and create interstate competition so we have insurance companies competing with each other. Obviously, if we have competition and the forces of the market at work, it helps to bring down costs and prices.

Another example is to allow small businesses to join larger groups to get the benefit of group purchasing power--to pool, if you will. That is something we have been proposing for some time, and it has been consistently defeated by Democrats in Congress. Other examples are reducing the cost of defensive medicine by ending the junk lawsuits that clog up our legal system and drive up the cost of health care, allowing an expanded use of health savings accounts and those types of vehicles that are out there for people today to put money aside for their health care needs; allowing people to have a refundable tax credit so they can buy their own insurance, which would give them more choices, create more competition, and, again, put downward pressure on the cost and price of health care in this country.

Those are commonsense step-by-step solutions that we think would work so much better than having one-sixth of our entire economy, which is what health care represents, taken over by the Federal Government. Political command and control in Washington, DC, is driving the decisionmaking for Americans across the country. As we have already seen, the Federal Government does not do complicated tasks very well, and the Federal Government doesn't do comprehensive tasks very well.

Everybody talked about a comprehensive solution to this problem. Clearly, we have problems in America today that need to be addressed. We have a lot of people who don't have health care, and that needs to be fixed. We have people with preexisting conditions, and that needs to be addressed. There are solutions to those problems that don't include and don't entail having the Federal Government take over one-sixth of the American economy, which is what happened with ObamaCare. We are seeing the impacts and the results of that today.

I suggest we take a timeout and make a conscious decision to move in a different direction--a direction that will lead to lower costs, higher quality of care, allow people to keep the plan they like if they like it, allow people to keep the doctor they like, and keep the cost of health care at an affordable level.

One thing we have seen since ObamaCare passed and is now in the process of being implemented is that the promise that people would see their health care costs go down, not up--that promise is another broken promise because what we are seeing in America today is canceled policies. As people try to get new policies, there are increased costs. We are seeing that in the individual marketplace. When the President was campaigning for his health care law, he said he would drive the costs down for families by $2,500 per family. Yet we have seen the cost per family increase since he took office by $2,500.

We have a cloud hanging over our economy right now because of this massive new regulation with a massive amount of government mandates. Due to government-approved insurance, the workweek has been redefined from a 40-hour workweek to a 30-hour workweek. We have a lot of

employers who are creating part-time jobs instead of full-time jobs. In order to avoid the mandates and requirements and costs associated with ObamaCare, employers are hiring people to get under that 30-hour workweek. There are a lot of people who are hired to work 29 hours a week. Well, Americans can't take care of their families and meet the needs they have in their personal and family budgets on 29 hours a week, so more and more people are having to get more than one job. In fact, some estimates show that the majority of jobs that have been created over the last year have been part-time jobs, not full-time jobs. That is the impact this is having on the overall economy.

If we are serious about getting the economy growing and expanding again and creating good-paying jobs for middle-class Americans, there are a number of things we can do to create that kind of economic growth. What we have seen of late is a growth rate that hovers between 1 and 2 percent. The economy is lethargic and sluggish compared to any historic average. We continue to have chronic high unemployment. If we factor in that the labor participation force is literally at the lowest level in the last 35 years, we would have to go back to the administration of President Carter. At that time there were fewer people working as a percentage of the entire workforce. If we factor that in, we have an economy that is in a very bad way.

As I said, there are a whole series of things that need to be done to get the economy growing and expanding at a faster rate, create more jobs, and increase the take-home pay for middle-class Americans. We really need to start over with Obamacare.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute.

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Mr. THUNE. I suggest it starts with shutting this down and starting over. We need to create more options, more choices, and more competition in the health care economy so people can get away from the sticker shock we have seen with ObamaCare and get costs down. We need to get away from these cancellation notices that are going out and allow people to keep the care and doctor they have and like. Because of the broken promises under ObamaCare, that is not happening.

Until we decide this was the wrong direction and pivot and go in a different direction, we are going to continue to see the results we have today--higher costs, more cancellations, people not being able to keep the care they like or the doctor they like. We can do better and should do better.

I yield the floor.

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