Nomination of Michelle T. Friendland to be United States Circuit Judge for the Ninth Circuit -- Resumed

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Thank you, Madam President.

HEALTH CARE

There was a new announcement today from the Secretary of Health and Human Services that 7.5 million people have signed up for private health care through the exchanges by virtue of the Affordable Care Act. The initial estimates from CBO last fall were that in the best case about 6 million people were going to sign up. We have blown through that enrollment expectation, and still, on this floor and in committee hearings as recently as this morning, Republicans continue to criticize and critique this law with blistering attacks--not because they have data on their side, not because they have evidence on their side, but because their entire electoral strategy for the fall depends on an assault on the Affordable Care Act.

The problem is that increasingly day by day, as more information comes out about the life-changing, life-altering success of this law, there simply is not the evidence to back up the claim from the Republicans that the Affordable Care Act isn't working. In fact, the reason why a new Washington Post poll shows that for the first time more Americans support the Affordable Care Act rather than oppose it is because they know the Affordable Care Act is working. Yet my good friend Representative Paul Ryan says that despite 7 million people signing up for the law, ``the architecture of this law is so fundamentally flawed that I think it is going to collapse under its own weight.''

One of our own colleagues said, ``I don't think the 7 million enrollment figure means anything. They are cooking the books on this.''

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer says that the 7.1 million enrollment figure was a ``phony number'' and that all the changes and delays must mean the majority of the law is already on its way out.

Well, that is the story Republicans are telling here in Washington, but our constituents in Democratic States and Republican States are telling a very different story.

I would like to talk about the numbers for a second because data can be pretty tricky when it gets in the way of your political argument. As one of our former colleagues from New York said--and I am paraphrasing--we are all entitled to our own opinions, but we are not entitled to our own facts.

Here we are. This is the percentage of uninsured in the United States by quarter. We start in 2008, which is essentially the beginning of the recession, and, as would be expected over the course of the recession, the number of uninsured rises from 14.5 percent to a peak of 18 percent. But guess what happens when it hits the peak. The Affordable Care Act goes into operation. The Affordable Care Act begins to be implemented, and in a very short period of time from the beginning of enrollment until the end of the first period of enrollment being March 31, the number goes from 18 percent uninsured to 15.6 uninsured. That is a remarkable decrease over a very short period of time that can only be explained by the fact that 7 million people now have access to private health care insurance, another 3 million people have access to Medicaid, and another 3 million people on top of that have access to insurance on their parents' plans.

When we look at what has happened to young people over a similar period of time, we can see the same dynamic playing out. This is the rate of uninsured of 18- to 25-year-olds in this country. Here, they are at 28 percent. I mean, how on Earth, in the most affluent, most powerful country in the world, did we ever allow for more than one-quarter of our young people to be uninsured? But we were at 28.4 percent, and when the Affordable Care Act was passed and the first provision went into effect, it allowed people who were under 26 to stay on their parents' plans.

Look. The number starts to move downward. It is a pretty consistent downward slope, moving from 28 to about 24. Then the ACA plans start, and then the number--just as in the uninsured data for the population at large--drops again from 24 down to 21. It was 28 percent at the passage of the law, and it is 21.7 percent today.

Other studies show the same. This is survey data from Gallup, which is generally the gold standard on tracking the rate of uninsured in the country. But we also have a RAND study that was done. This is a very well-known consulting study which said that from the period of September of last year until mid-March, 9.3 million people who were uninsured became insured.

So when Republicans say this data doesn't really tell you the true story because these are all people just shifting from one plan to another, that is not true. The RAND study tells us that 9.3 million people who were uninsured became insured. The RAND study also says that 7.2 million people got access to employer-based insurance who didn't have it previously. And that data doesn't even include the surge of enrollment at the end of March. The RAND study only brings us up to about mid-March.

So this is the real story. This is what the numbers and the data tell us: that people are getting access to insurance for the first time ever. The Affordable Care Act isn't just shifting people from one insurance plan to another insurance plan; it is actually having a remarkable effect on the number of insured in this country.

I am not suggesting this trend line is going to continue along that axis, but, boy, if the next couple of years looks anything like the first 6 months of Affordable Care Act plans being available to people, we are going to see a revolution in this country in terms of the number of people who are outside our health care system. Yet this week was the 52nd, 53rd, 54th vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act in the House of Representatives. The Presiding Officer and I sat through probably 40 of those votes and there is another one today.

A budget presented, again, by Representative Paul Ryan would take away insurance from 7 million people who now have it, take away Medicaid coverage from 3 million more people who have it, would repeal a law that has provided $9 billion in savings for seniors when they are in the doughnut hole. And $9 billion is a big number and hard to comprehend. By the way, his bill would return that $9 billion to the drug industry because that is where it came from. It didn't shift money from one set of taxpayers to another set of taxpayers. The way we closed the doughnut hole was asking the drug industry to put up some money in order to help seniors.

The irony of all ironies is that the Ryan budget--while repealing all of the provisions that have provided insurance to over 10 million people and discounted health care for millions more--would keep in place the $716 billion in Medicare savings that Republicans and outside groups have hammered Democrats for supporting over the course of the last 5 years.

Over and over we have been told we are killing Medicare Advantage by asking Medicare Advantage to run their insurance plans for the same costs that Medicare charges. Yet despite all of the rhetoric, the Republican budget in the House would keep in place all of the Medicare cuts they have been running against outside of this building.

What our constituents know is that despite bumps in the road, the Affordable Care Act works. Anytime you reorder one-sixth of the American economy, you are going to have problems and you are going to have people who are going to be unhappy. The reality is that for decades we had the most expensive health care system in the
world, times two, compared to any other industrialized nation, and we were getting results that didn't measure up to the amount of money we were spending. We had 30 million people who were uninsured, rates of infant immortality and infections that were way above countries spending half as much as we did. We had to make a change. That there were 54 votes in the House of Representatives to repeal the bill, and not a single effort to replace it, tells you that it has been Democrats who have been willing to step to the plate and do the tough reform necessary to try to make changes that were 100 years overdue. The numbers don't lie in the end.

I get it that Republicans think they can win an election by continuing to hammer away at the Affordable Care Act, but there are 7 1/2 million people who now have private health care. There are 3 million people who now have access to Medicaid. There are 3 million more young adults who can stay on their parents' plans. RAND and Gallup tell us that the number of people without insurance in this country is absolutely plummeting by the day. All of that is evidence that despite the best intentions from our Republicans to undermine the law the ACA works.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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