Keep Your Health Plan Act of 2013
Floor Speech
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Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess) for yielding me the time; and I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong, strong opposition to this closed rule and to the underlying bill. This is effort number 46, by my count, to gut the Affordable Care Act.
Before I discuss the problems with the underlying bill, let me address, just so the record is clear, the latest example of lousy process foisted upon this House by the Republican leadership.
The bill before us today would make sweeping and significant changes to the Affordable Care Act and, thus, to the Nation's health care system. It would profoundly affect the lives of millions of Americans, upend the individual market, and add confusion and uncertainty into an already complicated situation.
So how many hearings did the Republicans hold on this bill? Zero. Let me repeat that: zero. How many expert witnesses did they call? Zip. How many markups did they have in the committees of jurisdiction? Nada. Yet again, Republican promises of regular order and a thoughtful legislative process have been thrown out the window.
And with all due respect to my friend from Texas, to stand here and say with a straight face that this is some kind of an emergency, we can't have any amendments made in order, we just don't have the time, defies comprehension.
We have a rule that is closed that allows for 1 hour of debate--not even split amongst the committees of jurisdiction. This bill, by right, is not only an Energy and Commerce bill, it is a Ways and Means bill, but the Ways and Means Committee doesn't get any time to debate this bill.
Mr. Speaker, 1 hour. You mean we couldn't have 2 hours of debate and a few amendments? Or 3 hours of debate and a few more amendments? Or 5 hours of debate or a whole day of debate, given the fact that you didn't hold any hearings on this bill? Give me a break. This is not the way to run the House of Representatives. This is not the way you promised you would run the House of Representatives. And, by contrast, on the Affordable Care Act, we had hundreds of hours of debate and markups in which Republican amendments were actually accepted. Now you may not like the Affordable Care Act, but it went through a process. This went through no process. This was just brought up to the Rules Committee, and we are told to bring it right to the floor.
This is not a serious attempt to fix the Affordable Care Act. This is a political statement, and I understand the temptation behind it. Believe me, no one is more frustrated by the problems with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act than those of us who voted for it, believe in it, and want it to work. But instead of working with us to try to actually fix the problems and make the law work, the Republicans have brought forth this Upton bill.
Now, Mr. Speaker, let me be very clear about this bill. It is an attempt to drag us back to the bad old days of the American health care system. It would allow insurance companies to go back to offering cut-rate, shoddy policies that lack the consumer protections required by the Affordable Care Act.
So if you want to go back to a system where insurance companies could turn people away because they are sick, by all means vote for this bill. If you want to go back to a time when women were charged higher rates than men because being a female counted as a preexisting condition, then vote for the Upton bill. If you believe that insurers should be allowed to eliminate somebody's coverage if they get sick or are older or if they have a child or for no good reason whatsoever, then the Upton bill is for you. In short, a vote for the Upton bill is a vote in favor of everything the American people say that they hate about the health care system in this country.
Yesterday, in the Rules Committee, my friend, Dr. Burgess, made it very clear that the Upton bill is not an attempt to fix the Affordable Care Act. They are only interested in full repeal. They are perfectly satisfied with 40 million Americans having no health insurance at all. Speaker Boehner made a similar statement yesterday.
As I said, the rollout of the health care plan has not been perfect, and I know that my own home State of Massachusetts, the rollout of our State health care law was not perfect either. But Democrats in Massachusetts did not go out of their way over and over and over again to sabotage it just because a Republican Governor named Mitt Romney signed it into law. We worked to make it better. And by 2009, I am proud to say, my congressional district had the highest rate of insurance coverage in the entire country. That is a good thing.
If my Republican friends think that we are going to go back to a system where we in Massachusetts did the right thing but ended up paying for the uncompensated care of people in Texas, North Carolina, Utah, or anywhere else, they are wrong.
At some point, we have to get serious about the goal of providing good quality, affordable health insurance to every American. The Upton bill gets us no closer to that goal. It is yet another political waste of time.
Mr. Speaker, let me just close by making this observation. What this debate is about--and it has turned into an ideological debate--is whether or not you believe that every single American in this country is entitled to good quality health insurance or not.
My friends on the other side of the aisle obviously believe that it is okay that 40 million Americans don't have health insurance, because for the last few years they haven't offered anything other than repeal--repeal, repeal, repeal--and offering nothing as a substitute. They think it is okay to let the insurance companies decide whether you get health care or not based on a preexisting condition or whether you are a female or whether or not you are too old or too sick or whatever. They have been perfectly satisfied with the broken system that was in place.
So that is the choice here. And I would urge my colleagues to understand that there is something wrong with the fact that, in the greatest country in the world and the richest country in the history of the world, so many of our fellow citizens don't have health care, don't have access to health insurance.
And we can fix that. By fixing that, we not only improve the quality of life for our neighbors, our friends, and our fellow citizens, but we also help control health care costs. Because one of the biggest drivers of increased health care costs is the uncompensated care pool.
So let's get serious. Let's stop this political posturing. I know you don't like the President. You have gone out of your way to say some things that are so outrageous, it is hard for me to believe that Members of Congress would say such things. But get over it and do what is right for the American people. Vote ``no'' on this closed rule. Vote ``no'' on the underlying bill.
I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. Speaker, let me again remind my colleagues that not a single hearing was held on this bill. Not a single markup was held on this bill, nothing, and it is coming to the floor under a closed rule.
My Republican friends believe that nobody in this House, Democrats or Republicans, have any right to offer an opinion or an alternative. We are given 1 hour of debate on this. It is not evenly split among the committees of jurisdiction. One committee of jurisdiction.
This is a joke. This is not what you promised. This is not the open process. This is not the transparent process on major pieces of legislation that we were promised. This is a joke.
I will insert into the Record a Statement of Administration Policy that says that the President, if presented with H.R. 3350, would veto it.
This is a colossal waste of time.
Statement of Administration Policy
H.R. 3350--KEEP YOUR HEALTH PLAN ACT OF 2013
(Rep. Upton, R-MI, and 161 cosponsors, Nov. 14, 2013)
The Administration strongly opposes House passage of H.R. 3350 because it threatens the health care security of hard working, middle class families. The Nation is experiencing the slowest growth in health spending in the last 50 years. Since 2008, growth in private health insurance spending stayed between three and four percent--significantly lower than earlier this decade when growth reached almost 12 percent. With health care costs rising at such low rates, this bill would be a major step back.
H.R. 3350 rolls back the progress made by allowing insurers to continue to sell new plans that deploy practices such as not offering coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, charging women more than men, and continuing yearly caps on the amount of care that enrollees receive. The Administration supports policies that allow people to keep the health plans that they have. But, policies that reverse the progress made to extend quality, affordable coverage to millions of uninsured, hardworking, middle class families are not the solution. Rather than refighting old political battles to sabotage the health care law, the Congress should work with the Administration to improve the law and move forward.
If the President were presented with H.R. 3350, he would veto it.
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Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
What the gentleman conveniently leaves out are the hundreds of hours of hearings and markups that occurred in the committees of jurisdiction on the Affordable Care Act. The committees of jurisdiction were just cut out of this.
It is becoming a pattern in this House. This is not the only bill where the committees of jurisdiction have been cut out of the process, where Members' voices have been silenced, where they are enforcing rules with an iron fist in this Chamber. So this, unfortunately, is not unique. It is a pattern.
But to suggest that we don't have the time to offer amendments is just ridiculous. We have plenty of time. We could debate this all day if we wanted to, and Members could have an opportunity, both Democrats and Republicans, to amend this, given the fact that they were denied that right in the committees of jurisdiction.
Mr. Speaker, I will enter into the Record an article that appeared in the National Review Online, entitled, ``Boehner: Upton Bill a Step on Path to ObamaCare Repeal,'' because what is going on here is very simple.
If you believe that 40 million Americans should be without health insurance, then vote for this bill. That is what they want to do. They want to repeal the Affordable Care Act to go back to a point at which it was perfectly acceptable and okay to have 40 million Americans without health insurance. Now, many of us found that statistic unconscionable in this country, the richest country in the history of the world, and we thought it was bad policy to allow for so many uninsured Americans because that also resulted in higher health care costs, but that is what the goal here is.
The goal here is to undo all of the protections that allow you to keep your kids on your insurance policies until they are 26, that prohibit insurance companies from discriminating against women because they define being a female as a preexisting condition, and all of these artificial rules and regulations that insurance companies threw upon people, these insurance policies that people bought thinking they had insurance only to find out when they got sick they had nothing.
If you want to go back to that, then side with my Republican friends; but what we want to do here is work as we did in Massachusetts, by the way, with Governor Romney, in order to make this work. I will tell you, for the life of me, I don't understand why this is such a radical idea to guarantee everybody in this country good, quality health insurance.
[From the National Review, Nov. 13, 2013]
Boehner: Upton Bill a Step on Path to Obamacare Repeal
(By Jonathan Strong)
Before the government shutdown in July, as the defund push from Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee was just starting to gain steam, Speaker John Boehner laid-out his preferred Obamacare strategy to House Republicans in a closed-door conference meeting, telling them the GOP could repeal the law with ``targeted strikes that will ultimately dissolve the Obamacare coalition.''
This morning, in another conference meeting, Boehner reminded his colleagues about that strategy and explained how bringing the ``keep your plan'' bill introduced by Representative Fred Upton to the House floor Friday fits into it.
``Remember the strategy for stopping Obamacare we laid out to you back in July. It had two components: Aggressive, coordinated oversight, and targeted legislative strikes aimed at shattering the legislative coalition the president has used to force his law on the nation,'' Boehner said, according to a person in the room.
``That plan is being executed as we speak. But none of it will be effective if we aren't communicating. If we aren't telling the stories our constituents are sharing, then we're letting them down. It means we aren't doing our best to stop this law,'' he added.
With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone), the ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, who suffered a long and arduous Rules Committee last night.
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I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, the gentleman talks about faith. I
think the American people have lost faith in the Republican leadership of this House. My friends are so obsessed with this health care bill that they actually shut the government down. Ted Cruz was the Speaker of the House here for a month. I mean, they shut the government down because they do not believe that 40 million uninsured Americans ought to have health insurance.
Ezra Klein, in his Washington Post piece on November 14, writes about the Upton bill.
He says:
It doesn't solve the cancelations problem, but it does manage to put Republicans on the side of insurers, who want to continue discriminating against preexisting conditions.
That is what this is all about: giving the insurance companies more of what they want. If you want to know why, follow the money. It is no secret where the insurance companies' allegiances are. Quite frankly, my friends have had 3 years in control to give us their alternative. They have said ``no'' to everything. No, no, no. They try to undercut and repeal everything. What have they offered in 3 years? What is their prescription for the uninsured in America? Take two tax breaks and call me in the morning. That is the best they could come up with.
This is a good bill, and we need to work to implement it so that we can make sure that every single American has access to good, quality health insurance.
With that, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Maloney).
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