Making Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for the Fiscal Year Ending September 30, 2014 -- Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, before I speak on the topic of Affordable Care Act, reports are emerging that the House of Representatives is going to adjourn without taking any votes on a border supplemental that would allow this country to humanely deal with a crisis of epidemic proportions on our border as over 50,000 children right now are being warehoused, shoulder to shoulder, without any sign from the Congress of help coming.

There are legitimate differences in what manner we provide this emergency funding to try to deal with this humanitarian crisis, but shame on the House of Representatives as they leave town today without even having attempted to take a vote on a supplemental appropriations bill for the border.

I was in the chair yesterday as I listened to about three or four of our Republican colleagues come down to the floor, as they often do, and register their ongoing complaints about the Affordable Care Act. As has been the trendline over the past 4 months, those complaints have moved from those rooted in data to those rooted in anecdote.

There is no doubt that there are people in every single State in this country who continue to have poor interactions with the American health care system.

It is one-sixth of our economy, and as was the case before the Affordable Care Act, it will be the case after the Affordable Care Act. There are many people who will still pay too much, and there are still plenty of people who will not get enough in return.

But I wanted to spend a little bit of time on the floor today talking about what the actual data shows us, what the empirical evidence shows us. It is overwhelming in its conclusion that the Affordable Care Act is working--in many respects working better than anybody thought it would. So I want to take my colleague's arguments one at a time.

The first is a pretty simple one. Every bad interaction that happens in the American health care system is not the fault of the Affordable Care Act. I woke up a couple of days ago with a sore throat, but that wasn't President Obama's fault. That wasn't the fault of the Affordable Care Act. I had kind of a rough day. But I understand there are bad things that are going to continue to happen to me--especially when it comes to health care--that cannot necessarily be fixed by the Affordable Care Act. So one of the ongoing statistics that is used is the number of people who had their plans canceled. Well, most of the nonpartisan medical journals that have surveyed the number of cancellations before the Affordable

Care Act and the number of cancellations after the Affordable Care Act suggest this has been a problem that has been ongoing for years, that there is substantial churn every single year in terms of the number of plans that were offered that then are stopped being offered. The Affordable Care Act is not solely responsible for the fact that plans are being cancelled. People will still pay a lot in premiums. The Affordable Care Act makes it better. There are a lot fewer premium increases of over 10 percent since the Affordable Care Act was passed than before it was passed. But every time somebody is paying more than they would like for the health care they receive, that is not the fault of the Affordable Care Act.

The second argument is the difference between data and anecdote. So let me just spend a few minutes talking about what the ongoing avalanche of information, of data, of statistics tells us. So many of my colleagues come down and talk about the huge rates that people are paying for health care and blame it on the Affordable Care Act. The average premium that individuals paid for a plan on one of the Affordable Care Act exchanges over the course of the first year of its implementation was $82 per month--$82 per month. Now, there are some people who are paying more, but the average is $82 a month. That is a pretty sweet deal to get health care coverage in this country.

And they needed it. A study showed that 60 percent of adults with new coverage used it and 60 percent of those individuals say they could never have afforded to get the care had they not had insurance in the first place.

And people like it. Consumer survey after consumer survey shows that the majority of people who are on these new plans want to keep them and have said their experience has been good, excellent or satisfactory. So that is the real story about what is happening on the exchanges.

What about cost? My colleagues say it really hasn't done anything to control costs. That is not the case. Health care inflation in this country is at a 50-year low. Medicare spending--that is the money that we all pay as federal taxpayers--is $1,000 per beneficiary lower than it was projected to be in 2014. So $1,000 in spending per individual has disappeared from the system, and a large part of the reason for that is the Affordable Care Act.

We had a bipartisan briefing sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund this week, and both the Republican economists and the Democratic economists believe the Affordable Care Act, though not solely responsible for that reduction in price, is a big, big part of that cost-reduction story.

People will say it is not coming through on premiums; we are still seeing premium increases that are bigger than we would like. Well, they are smaller than they were before the Affordable Care Act, but the Affordable Care Act also has this provision in it that requires insurance companies to spend a certain percentage of all the money they collect on care, and if they pad their profits with too much of your premiums, then they have to return that money to you. We just found out that consumers have already saved $330 million in money that was directly returned to them, and over all have saved $9 billion in savings on premiums because of this provision, which essentially says if you get charged too much, the insurance company now cannot keep that money for themselves. They have to return it to you. That is the best protection you can have from premiums that are too high. It is not theoretical; it is practical--the $330 million in checks written by insurance companies and given to individuals.

The data continues to show us the Affordable Care Act is working, and I haven't even gotten into the data I have brought down here week after week, which is stunning in terms of the number of people who now have insurance: 8 million people insured on the exchanges--a 25-percent reduction in the number of uninsured in this country. Even the most optimistic of ACA supporters could never have thought we would have a 25-percent reduction in the number of uninsured in this country in the first 6 months of implementation. The numbers don't lie.

But here is my last point: Senators and Members of Congress who come down and complain about the performance of the Affordable Care Act in their State, when their State has done everything in its power to undermine the Affordable Care Act, have some explaining to do. The reality is there are States such as Connecticut that are working hard to implement the Affordable Care Act, and there are other States that are working to undermine the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act works really well in States that want it to work, and it has a little bit more trouble in States that are trying to undermine it. Let me give you an example that comes from a speech given earlier on the floor by Senator Nelson. Senator Nelson talked about how Florida, through its Republican Governor and Republican legislature, has taken away from the insurance commissioner the ability to approve increases in insurance rates. And so, guess what. They are seeing premium increases that are rather unappetizing to Florida residents because the legislature has taken away from the government the ability to monitor, review, and approve those rates.

Compare that with the State of Connecticut, which is working hard to implement the Affordable Care Act and act on behalf of rate payers and consumers. Our biggest insurer a couple of months ago proposed a 12-percent increase in rates under the Affordable Care Act in Connecticut's exchange. We have the ability to review those rates in Connecticut. We did that, and the insurance commission in our State just 2 days ago came back and reduced that rate increase from 12 percent to 1 percent. Blue Cross Blue Shield is not going to stop offering insurance on the Connecticut exchange. They are just going to do it with a rate increase that is commensurate with the actual increase in costs of care to Anthem rather than a number that is not based on actual data.

So in a State such as Connecticut, where we have seen twice as many people enroll as we originally estimated, where we have seen Medicaid expansion provide access to insurance for thousands upon thousands of Connecticut residents who have insurance in a way that people in Florida do not because of their lack of Medicaid expansion, we also have taken steps to protect consumers from premium increases.

So for colleagues who are going to complain about high premium increases, you have to acknowledge there are steps that your State could have taken to make it better. For colleagues who are going to talk about the fact that there aren't enough people enrolled, well, then your State could have taken steps to enroll more people.

Not everything is the fault of the Affordable Care Act when things go wrong for families. The data does not back up the anecdotes that are brought to this floor. In States that are working to implement the law, it works a lot better than in States that are working to undermine it.

The story is clear. Whether it is a decrease in people that don't have insurance, the decreasing rate of medical inflation all across the country or the improving quality of health care in every corner of this Nation, the Affordable Care Act is working.

I yield back the floor.

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