Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014
Floor Speech
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Mr. President, we all know a huge percentage of Americans across the country filled out their brackets a couple of weeks ago to get ready for March Madness. Now it is down to the final four, and once again the University of Kentucky is in the final four. It has become something we are quite accustomed to after having won the championship at UK in 2012. We kept the championship in our State for 2013 with the University of Louisville. Now we intend to further underscore that the college basketball capital of the world is indeed in the Commonwealth, and we look forward to watching in Dallas the final four next weekend.
ACA SIGNUP DEADLINE
Mr. President, today is the normal deadline for most people to sign up for ObamaCare, and while one Senator on the other side of the aisle said yesterday there is no such thing as ObamaCare, that will come as news to millions of our constituents--the millions of Americans facing higher premiums, canceled plans, and the loss of doctors and hospitals they like as a result of this law.
ObamaCare is definitely real to middle-class families whom we represent. If our friends on the other side want to make the pain of this law go away, they can work with us to replace it with smart, bipartisan reforms. They are trying to wish away their own ObamaCare law or are simply pretending it is not there. That is not going to work. The American people deserve a law better than that.
INNOVATION AND OPPORTUNITY
We will be having a vigorous debate this week in the Senate about how to create jobs and rebuild the middle class. On the one side our good friends the Democrats will be offering more of the same. They will propose treating the symptoms instead of meaningfully improving the prospects of people who are struggling out there.
On the other side Republicans will be proposing concrete ways to break the cycle of unemployment and hopelessness that pervades the Obama economy, ideas aimed at helping people reach their true potential and build a better life for themselves. The Republican message is all about innovation and opportunity and making it easier for more people to join the ranks of the middle class. It is about reforming the underlying causes of unemployment instead of just perpetually treating the symptoms. It is about how we create jobs for the future that will allow Americans to do a lot more than simply pay their bills.
Republicans will offer a series of jobs amendments this week that underline our determination to reorient America's economic trajectory. We want to lift our country from stagnation to growth, from hostility toward enterprise to an embrace of innovation, and from a system rigged by government elites for their own benefit to one that can actually work for the middle class again.
Americans will hear two competing agendas this week: on the one hand, a tired, government-centered Democratic agenda designed by and for ideologues of the left; on the other, a modern, enterprise-oriented Republican agenda designed around the hopes and potential of the middle class.
This is a debate Republicans welcome. It is one we have been waiting to have for a very long time, and we hope Washington Democrats will actually be serious this time when they say they want to focus on jobs because every time they say that, they keep getting distracted and pivot to other issues.
Here is something else we need to expect from the majority: votes on amendments for positive reform. The American people deserve at least that much. After so many years of failure, the middle class deserves the chance for something better. Remember, there are nearly 4 million Americans who have been unemployed for 6 months or longer. These Americans deserve to have a Congress that is committed to making it easier, not harder, to create jobs.
Let's have this debate. Let's vote on Republican jobs amendments, and let's give some hope again to the middle-class families who have suffered for entirely too long.
I yield the floor.
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