Hire More Heroes Act of 2014-Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, there was a fairly remarkable hearing in the House of Representatives yesterday in the Energy and Commerce Committee, upon which I used to sit when I was there. It called together some of the Nation's biggest insurers to talk about the failures of the Affordable Care Act as seen through the lens of the insurance companies.

First up on the docket for Republicans was the claim that no one had paid their premiums, that people had signed up for plans, but a report which had been released by the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House suggested in fact only maybe about 60 percent of them actually paid their premiums.

So they asked representatives from WellPoint, Aetna, and other insurance companies to confirm that fact, and of course they did not. WellPoint said, in fact, 90 percent of the people who signed up for WellPoint plans--the biggest insurer through the Affordable Care Act--have paid their premiums. Aetna said the number for them is somewhere in the low to mid-80s. Both numbers are actually representative of what people in the non-Affordable Care Act market pay with respect to their premiums.

When we dig deeper into the Energy and Commerce report, we found out the reason they suggested that only about 60 percent of the people had paid their premiums is because most people's premiums hadn't been due yet. They didn't have to pay them when they had signed up for the plans in February and March.

So they tried another tactic. They said: We have heard all these reports and news media representations that you are going to be increasing premiums next year by double digits.

The insurers said: No, we have no idea what our premiums are going to be next year. We don't have the data yet. In fact, we are starting to get the subsidies coming into our plans that help keep these premiums affordable for low- and middle-class individuals across the country.

It turned out to be an absolute disaster for Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee because, as the insurers also pointed out, their profits have done pretty well, their stock prices have done pretty well over the past several years, because the Affordable Care Act is working for patients and, as it turns out, for the insurance companies that have offered plans on the exchanges.

It is representative of a whole litany of complaints Republicans have registered with respect to the Affordable Care Act's horror stories and worst-case scenarios which have simply not come true. I will take a few minutes to run through each of these arguments because I think it is important to have some context to understand that each one of their representations has not come true. Thus, as they turn to their next series of representations or challenges to the act, I think we can look back on history as a pretty good predictor of the future when it comes to Republicans' ability to prognosticate about an Affordable Care Act which is working now for millions of Americans.

The first thing they said is nobody is going to enroll. They said the Web site was unfixable. Of course we know that is the easiest to debunk now that we have 8 million people who have enrolled through the private exchanges and another 4 million to 6 million people who have enrolled via Medicaid expansion, and 3 million young adults who are now on their parents' plan. In fact, enrollment far outpaced what initial expectations were and beat the CBO estimates by 2 million people.

So clearly Republicans were wrong when they said nobody would sign up for the Affordable Care Act. They were also wrong when they said the Web site couldn't be fixed. There is no excuse for what happened in the fall of last year on the Web site, but it got up and running. Once it did, people were able to get on in record numbers.

They said the Affordable Care Act was going to kill jobs. We have done nothing but add jobs by the millions since the Affordable Care Act was passed. There is a chart, which I don't have on the floor, that shows what has happened since the Affordable Care Act went into law: Job growth has continued unabated.

Specifically, Republicans said: It is going to result in people who were working full time to move to part-time work. The Congressional Budget Office in a report which came out about 2 months ago said there is absolutely no economic evidence to suggest full-time work is shifting to part-time work. That is not a trend actually happening in the economy. I understand there are anecdotes and stories which are true where employers have made that choice, but there is no broader economic evidence that there is a shift from full-time work to part-time work.

Republicans said it is going to cost too much. Sylvia Burwell was before the HELP Committee today, and she was very articulate in explaining the simple fact that the Congressional Budget Office has revised downward Federal health care expenditures by $900 billion over the 10-year period from the passage of the Affordable Care Act to a decade later. We are going to be spending $900 billion less than the CBO initially thought we would, in large part because of all the wellness, prevention, and pay-for-performance measures built into the Affordable Care Act.

Premiums are lower than expected on these exchanges, which saves $5 billion in and of itself. The overall cost of the bill is 17 percent lower than what CBO initially estimated--huge savings for the Federal budget and for the specific line items within the Federal health care act.

OK. Fine, they said, but young people aren't going to sign up. It is ultimately going to be older, sicker people, and you will not have the right mix.

I think I said WellPoint was the biggest insurer. It is in fact the second biggest insurer. They said the average age of enrollment has come down every single day in a meaningful fashion. The risk pool and the product selection seem to be coming in the manner we had hoped. It is very encouraging right now.

Big companies such as United are going to be offering new plans on exchanges similar to those in Connecticut because they as well see the risk pools are exactly as they had hoped.

But the uninsured will not sign up. This is just people who were insured shifting to other plans which are perhaps better or cheaper for them--bunk as well. The new Gallup survey, which is the best data we have on the number of people who have or don't have insurance in this country, shows remarkable decreases over the last two quarters in the number of uninsured people in this country--frankly, numbers which almost seem too good to be true--a 25-percent reduction in 6 months' time with respect to the number of people without insurance in this country. One-quarter of the Nation's uninsured are now insured in the first 6 months of the full implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Lastly, one of the biggest red herrings in this debate has been the issue of cancellations. No doubt there have been hundreds of thousands of plans all across the country that have been canceled since the Affordable Care Act was put into place, but Health Affairs, one of the most respected, nonpartisan health journals in the country, did an article, I believe a couple weeks ago, which said there is absolutely nothing different about the number of cancellations which happened in the wake of the implementation of the act as compared to what had happened in that same period before the implementation of the act; that there is high turnover in the individual market.

While there are certainly some plans which were canceled by insurers because they didn't meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act, there wasn't a surge in cancellations compared with the number of cancellations which happened prior to the act.

So if we just go through--whether it is the claim that no one is paying their premiums or that rates are going to go up or that nobody will enroll, that it will kill jobs, that it will cost too much or that young people will not sign up or that the uninsured will not sign up or that cancellations are higher than normal--every single one of these claims turns out to be wrong.

That is not to say this act and its implementation hasn't been without its significant warts. There are flaws in the bill. There have been big bumps in implementation, but the fact is that polls are starting to show a growing acceptance and approval of the law amongst the American public because they have listened to these claims that the sky is going to fall from Republicans, and not only has the sky not fallen, but 15 million or so people across this country have more affordable health care because of the Affordable Care Act. The uninsurance rate in this Nation has dropped by 25 percent. Taxpayers are saving $900 billion over the course of the 10-year period following the passage of the bill.

I haven't even gotten into the quality metrics. Rates of hospital-acquired infections are down. The number of people who are readmitted to the hospital after a complicated surgery is dramatically down.

This is why we passed the Affordable Care Act. It hasn't lived up to everyone's expectation, but to the extent that the goal of the act was to reduce the number of people who are uninsured in this country, lower the rate of growth of health care expenditures, and increase quality, the data coming in on a day-by-day basis is overwhelming and impossible to ignore. More people have insurance, cost is coming down, and quality is getting better.

At some point the facts have to matter. As former Senator Moynihan said: Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, but you don't get to have your own set of facts.

Taxpayers, the uninsured, consumers of all stripes understand what the true story is; that all of the Republican prognostications about the failure of the Affordable Care Act have not come true in the past and they are not likely to come true in the future.

There is a lot of work to do to continue to make the Affordable Care Act better, and I hope every Senator is ready to do that work, but the data and the numbers tell us that increasingly, on a day-by-day basis, the Affordable Care Act works.

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

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