The Toll of Obamacare

Floor Speech

Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, we are now 7 weeks into the implementation of ObamaCare. We know that in the first 4 weeks, 106,000 Americans placed health plans in their shopping baskets, although it is not clear how many of them actually purchased plans. Meanwhile, it is estimated that 5.5 million Americans have lost the health insurance that they had, that they liked, and that they were promised that they could keep.

The inconvenient truth is that this law has dramatically increased the ranks of the uninsured. Yesterday came word that college students are seeing their low-cost student plans canceled, with replacement costs as much as 1,800 percent higher under ObamaCare.

Although the President recently assured the Nation that the cancelations are confined to the individual market, we are now learning that his administration gives a mid-range estimate that two-thirds of the small employer plans and 45 percent of the large employer plans face cancelation as well. Some estimates are as high as 93 million Americans who have employer-sponsored plans will lose their plans next year.

And these reports don't account for the millions more who are seeing massive rate increases in their current plans; nor do they account for the millions more who have had their hours cut back to part time or had their wages cut back or have lost their jobs altogether as employers struggle to stay in business while bearing these staggering costs; nor do they account for those who discover that by accepting ObamaCare plans, they are losing their doctors.

Walmart now warns that the financial impact of this law on families could materially depress holiday shopping.

Mr. Speaker, we are watching nothing less than the wholesale destruction and collapse of the American health care system, which, for all of its flaws, was still the most advanced, accessible, adaptable, and responsive health care system that the world has ever known; and if you doubt that for a second, ask yourself where the world's elites came when they needed first-class medical care. It wasn't to Canada or England or Mexico. It was to the United States. And now we are losing that.

There was nothing unforeseen about this fiasco. Republicans have been warning of these outcomes from the very beginning.

When we warned that Americans would not be able to keep their health care plans, we were called extremists. When we warned that ObamaCare would result in massive cost increases on consumers, we were called alarmists. When we warned that many Americans would lose their jobs, have their hours cut back, or see salary cuts, we were called racists. When we asked for a 1-year delay in this program to address these issues, we were called demagogues, arsonists, and jihadists.

But, now, all of these warnings are coming to pass, and still the Democrats persist in imposing this law on an unwilling Nation. In doing so, great violence is being done to our Constitution.

In implementing this takeover of one-sixth of the American economy, the President has repeatedly asserted what can only be described as a doctrine of executive nullification--the authority to ignore the parts of the law that he finds inconvenient or embarrassing and to pick and choose who must obey the law and who need not.

He has granted some 1,600 exemptions for well-connected interests--mainly labor unions. He has excused big businesses from the requirement that they provide health care to their employees, while forcing employees to fend for themselves. He has excused Members of Congress and their staffs from paying the full cost of ObamaCare policies.

And last Thursday, he announced that health insurers can ignore the law that requires them to cancel existing policies. Notice that he didn't say that he was going to seek to change the law. He said he would ignore the law for a year. He invited health insurers to do the same, in direct violation of the principle constitutional responsibility of the Presidency to ``take care that the laws be faithfully executed.''

Mr. Speaker, I appeal to my Democratic colleagues to consider the damage that this law is doing, both to the American health care system and to the rule of law itself and, above all, to the families who are struggling to deal with its effects.

I ask them to heed the growing pleas of the American people to have their health plans restored to them. I ask them to join Republicans in repealing ObamaCare and to help us replace it with the patient-centered health care system that we have long proposed: reforms that preserve the best of American health care while repairing its flaws.

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