Protect Women's Health from Corporate Interference Act of 2014 - Motion to Proceed - Continued

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, we are entering into a new era in which five men in the Supreme Court are going to get to make the decisions about what kind of health care you get as a matter of right, living under the protection of the laws of the United States, and what kind of health care you get as an employee, at the whim of the decisions made by your boss.

These are the kinds of decisions that your boss should be making: decisions about the direction of your company, decisions about the level of your salary, about new products that your business is going to offer.

This should not be your boss's decision. It should not be up to your boss as to whether you as a female employee get access to prescription contraceptives. But that is the world we live in today after the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, has given the power to particular employers to deny women access to prescription birth control.

Prescription birth control, contraception, is used by 99 percent of women in this country at one point over their life. A big portion of those prescriptions are actually for purposes related to complicated medical treatments such as cancer therapy. No matter how the Supreme Court tries to explain this, there is no way to effectively differentiate what the Supreme Court has done on birth control with a whole other range of potential discrimination.

As Justice Ginsburg said in her dissent, this exemption the Supreme Court has given for employers' religious beliefs would extend logically with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions held by Jehovah's Witnesses; to religious objections to antidepressants held by Scientologists; medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin held by certain religions; and even vaccinations, a belief held by Christian Scientists, amongst others.

The idea that the Supreme Court is now going to get into the business of micromanaging which particular religious beliefs they are going to protect and which ones they are not going to protect is unacceptable to the majority of people I represent, so that is why I am here today to support the Protect Women's Health from Corporate Interference Act. Pretty simple. All we are saying here is that employers should not be allowed to refuse health coverage that is guaranteed to their employees and their dependents under Federal law.

When we decide to pass a law with the majority of the House and the Senate agreeing to it, signed by the President, those protections should be available to all employees. It is not easy to pass a law and get it signed by the President. The Senate has already set up a lot of pretty significant barriers to the passage of any law, never mind a law that guarantees a certain level of health care coverage.

Until the Hobby Lobby decision, the Supreme Court has stayed out of that decision, said that if the Congress decides a minimum level of coverage should be available to employees, then employers should not be able to get in the way. That precedent is now blown up. There is no going back, as Justice Ginsburg has said. I hope we pass it this week.

The reality is it is more important now than ever to protect this coverage, because as a result of the Affordable Care Act, there are millions more women, millions more families all across the country who have access to prescription contraception. Twenty-four million more prescriptions for oral contraceptives were filled without a copay in 2013 than in 2012. That is by virtue of the protections in the Affordable Care Act.

On this particular type of prescription alone, the Affordable Care Act has saved $483 million in out-of-pocket costs for oral contraceptives. That saved a lot of families money, but that has also given access to this important medication for millions of women.

It is just another example, just another piece of evidence amidst a mounting pile, that tells us the Affordable Care Act is working today. I want to spend a few additional minutes going over the latest litany of good news when it comes to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Republicans have kind of gone quiet, silent even, in many parts of the Nation, when it comes to their critique of the Affordable Care Act. That is in large part because on both sides of the aisle, there is a quiet acceptance that the Affordable Care Act is working. It has vanished from most campaigns as a political issue this summer and this fall because it is increasingly impossible, aside from anecdotal evidence, to make the case on an empirical data-driven basis that the Affordable Care Act is not working.

Senator Reid did a little bit of this earlier this week, but I want to share again some of the new numbers we have. Here is maybe the most stunning number: The uninsured rate in the United States fell 2.2 percentage points in the second quarter of 2014. We now have the lowest quarterly rate of uninsured in this country since Gallup began tracking this percentage in 2008. There are approximately 20 to 25 percent less people and families in this country without insurance than 6 months ago. That is absolutely stunning, that in 6 months of implementation of this act, we

have taken one-quarter off the rolls of the uninsured in this country. Even the biggest optimists about how the implementation of the Affordable Care Act was going to go could not have guessed we were going to take that big a chunk out of the rolls of the uninsured.

But here is more evidence that this is working. Fifty-seven percent of the individuals who purchased coverage through the exchanges were uninsured when they were enrolled. So a lot of Republicans said: Well, you know, the big numbers you are seeing, 8 million people insured through the private health care exchanges, that may be people shifting from one kind of insurance to another.

Well, a Kaiser study says that, in fact, 6 out of 10 of the people who got insurance in the exchanges, through Medicaid, through staying on their parents' insurance, had no insurance beforehand. Frankly, to my mind, it does not necessarily matter, because to the extent they went on these plans coming off of another plan, it was for a reason: They were saving money, by and large. That is a good thing in and of itself.

But you have 4 out of 10 people going onto the new plans to save them money, 6 out of 10 people coming onto the new plans because they had no insurance at all. They are getting care as well. A new Commonwealth Fund survey says that 60 percent of the adults with this new coverage through the marketplace or Medicaid reported that they had visited a hospital or a doctor or filled a prescription. Sixty-two percent of those people said they could not have had access or afforded this care previously.

That was the theory. All of these people who were waiting to get so sick that they had to go to the emergency room, costing us all sorts of money in the long run, now can get preventive care. Of the 60 percent of the people who went out and saw a doctor because of the new coverage they had by virtue of the Affordable Care Act, 60 percent of them said they would have never gotten that care had they not had that coverage. That is millions of people, millions of people all across the country who are going to have an injury or an illness, who were going to sit at home and live with it until it got so bad they had to show up at the emergency room--they are now getting care.

What about the premiums? People said: Well, you know, these presume are going to be unaffordable and people are going to start paying them and then stop paying them. HHS did a survey of the premiums and found, on average, that the monthly premium people are paying is $82 per month, after a tax credit is factored in.

Listen, $82 a month is not pocket change. There are a lot of families out there who have trouble coming up with $82 a month. But for somebody like Susie Clayton, a breast cancer survivor from North Canaan, CT, that is a big deal. She is paying right about that number, $90 per month. But prior to the Affordable Care Act, because she had a preexisting condition, Susie Clayton was spending $1,600 per month. There are hundreds of thousands of Susie Claytons out there. Premiums are pretty affordable.

The critics said: All right, we will concede that more people are getting covered. We will concede they are using the care. We will concede premiums are affordable, in part because you are spending all of this money on premium assistance. But you are going to just start spiraling health care costs. Well, that did not come true either. With April's updated CBO projections, spending on major Federal health care programs--Medicare, Medicaid, and the ACA subsidies--has now been revised downward by $900 billion. That is a half a percent of GDP since the 2011 projections. So in 3 years, CBO has pushed down its projections of 10-year spending by $900 billion.

Here is an even more stunning way to think about this. If you look at what CBO said we were going to spend on a per-Medicare recipient basis in 2010 versus what they now say we are going to spend on that recipient today over the next 10 years, that per-Medicare recipient spending level has been decreased by $1,000. We are spending $1,000 less per Medicare recipient.

That does not have anything to do with the private exchanges. That has to do with all of the other provisions in the bill that start to shift health care spending away from a system that rewards volume: How much medicine you practice to a system that rewards outcomes: How good is the medicine you are practicing. Are you keeping your patients healthy?

The reality is that spending is remarkably low, historically low on health care. Listen, admittedly, some of that is because of an economy that has been slow to recover over the course of the last 6 years. But a lot of that is because of the Affordable Care Act, so much so that I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal the other day that said the President was to blame for the slow economy because he had been so successful in pushing down the rate of health care spending that now it was an economic catastrophe that we were spending so much less than we had initially projected on health care. There is no way for the President to win. If health care expenses spiral and premiums spiral, it is his fault. But if he does something to control health care premiums and health care costs, than it is a drag on the economy.

In the long run, the truth is if we get health care spending down, really just a transfer payment within our economy, then we have room to spend more money on much more necessary investments, in our infrastructure, in our scientific edge over other countries.

I am here today to support the underlying bill, because I think it is the right thing to do for women in this country, but also because it is part of a growing success story of the Affordable Care Act: $500 million saved on prescription contraception alone. But add that to all of the other evidence, and we are living in a world in which it is increasingly hard to argue that the Affordable Care Act is not working: millions more people covered, huge chunks out of the uninsured rolls being eliminated, costs for overall health care expenses decreasing. I will not even get into it this afternoon, but quality is improving as well. That is people having hospital-acquired infections, having to be readmitted to the hospital.

The stories just keep on coming in. I certainly understand that on an anecdotal basis you can find people who have had negative experiences with the health care system under the Affordable Care Act. I could find millions of other people before the Affordable Care Act was passed as well. But there are many more people like Sean and Emilie Hannon, who are two freelancers from Weston, CT, who were looking for coverage previous to the Affordable Care Act being passed. The best they could do was $1,500 per month from Golden Rule. When they heard about the Affordable Care Act, they called the Connecticut exchange and they found a plan through ConnectiCare that was going to cost them $309 a month. This is a fairly young couple, a savings of nearly 80 percent compared to what they used to pay. That is a story that can be replicated millions of times all across this country.

We would be wise this week to restore this protection to women across this country so they have access to affordable prescription birth control. That is just one part of a growing, overwhelming array of both success stories and positive data about the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, proving that the ACA works.

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

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source