Employee Health Care Protection Act of 2014
Floor Speech
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Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, this bill is nothing more than another political attack on the Affordable Care Act. In fact, I think this bill serves as House Republicans' 53rd vote to repeal or undermine the health care law.
If enacted, this bill would allow insurance companies to discriminate against small businesses if they have an older workforce, more women in their workforce, or if any of their employees or their children have preexisting health conditions. The impact is taking away from millions of workers key protections and puts insurance companies back in charge of their health care.
Even worse, I believe, it gives insurance companies the best of both worlds: millions of new customers through the ACA, but the ability to continue to cherry-pick employers with young, healthy workforces.
In fact, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the bill would have serious adverse effects on premiums, causing them to rise substantially for many small firms, and the CBO agrees. This bill causes serious harm.
Republicans are claiming that this is just another effort to help people keep the coverage they have, but let's be clear, if your insurance starts covering your child to the age of 26, you are not losing your old coverage, your coverage is simply getting better.
If your insurance starts covering preventive services like annual physicals and vaccinations and cancer screenings for free, that is not losing your old coverage, that is your coverage getting better. There is no evidence employers are dropping coverage en masse.
So Republicans are left to claim people are losing their coverage when their coverage is actually getting better. This is again the Republicans misleading the public.
Mr. Speaker, when the ACA passed, employers and health insurers had the option to grandfather their coverage. They could keep that coverage the same, and it would not have to comply with the new ACA reforms. They could even raise premiums and cost-sharing and still stay grandfathered.
For plans that did not grandfather, a host of important new consumer protections went into place before 2014. For example, plans had to limit their profits and overhead to 20 percent of the premiums they collect. If they failed to meet this standard, they must pay rebates to their customers. As a result, small businesses have saved a total of $2.5 billion on their premiums since 2011.
Mr. Speaker, in November 2013, the President announced that individuals and small businesses who are not yet ready to transition into the new, more fair, secure health coverage guaranteed by the ACA could remain in their existing plans for another year.
In March of this year, the President extended that policy, so that individuals and small businesses could keep their plans into 2016, but this bill goes much further and allows these plans to be sold to new customers.
So we are not talking about people keeping their plans. We are talking about selling old lousy plans, discriminatory plans, to new customers.
Since the ACA was passed, we have added key new benefits and protections to employer coverage, but at the same time, we have added 10 million jobs, we have helped 10 million people get health coverage, we have seen premiums rise at historically low levels, and we have extended the life of the Medicare trust fund by 13 years.
This is amazing progress, and we should not turn back. That is what the Republicans would have us do with this other repeal of the Affordable Care Act: turn us back to the old days where the insurance companies reigned, where discriminatory practices reigned, and where preexisting conditions were a basis for not getting coverage.
I urge Members to vote ``no.'' This should not be.
I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, this is frustrating to me because, again, we have just another effort to repeal or undermine the Affordable Care Act when we should all be working to implement the Affordable Care Act. Just to show what a waste of time, if you will, that this debate is today, I wanted to read a statement of President Obama's policy that was issued today with regard to this legislation. It says:
The administration strongly opposes House passage of H.R. 3522 because it threatens the health care security of hardworking middle class families. The Nation is experiencing the lowest rate of health care price inflation in nearly 50 years, and exceptionally slow growth in other measures of health costs, which have combined to dramatically slow the growth of small business premiums.
With health care costs rising at low rates and choices for small businesses improving through the Health Insurance Marketplace, this bill would be a major step backwards.
H.R. 3522 would roll back the progress made because of the Affordable Care Act and would allow insurers to deploy practices such as charging businesses more when a worker has a preexisting condition, or when it has more workers who are women than men. The bill would allow insurers to go back to capping the amount of care that enrollees receive, or to excluding coverage of proven preventative care. The administration supports policies that allow people to keep the health plans that they have. Its transition policies allow States and issuers to do just that. But policies that reverse the progress made to extend quality, affordable coverage to millions of uninsured, hardworking middle class families are not the solution. Rather than refighting old political battles to sabotage the health care law, the Congress should work with the administration to improve the law and move forward.
If the President were presented with this bill, he would veto it.
So, again, this is just a waste of time. We have so many other things that we need to work on in this House before we adjourn, particularly jobs and the economy. Instead, we are trying to repeal, again, the same legislation that actually has created more jobs and kept health care costs low, and it is just, again, a complete waste of time.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, this bill represents a direct assault on the health security of American families. The bill would allow insurance companies in their small business health plans to charge more for women's coverage, meaning workers in small businesses with more women than men have to pay more.
It would charge more for coverage for those with preexisting conditions, meaning workers in small businesses that have more people with preexisting conditions have to pay more. And these small businesses would face higher premiums and would continue to see their premiums spike year to year if an employee had an accident or got diagnosed with cancer.
Under the legislation, insurers group plans' could also impose annual limits on coverage, meaning that insurers could cease to provide any coverage after an individual's care reached a certain overall cost and impose extensive waiting periods before an employer could enroll in coverage.
Now, if the Republicans were serious about helping America's small businesses, they would be bringing up, instead, a bill to expand access to the ACA's small business health care tax credit, as actually proposed by the Obama administration.
The President has proposed allowing small businesses with up to 50 workers, rather than the current 25, to qualify for the credit, and adopting a more generous phaseout schedule.
Furthermore, instead of strengthening the small business tax credit, Republicans have actually voted to repeal the tax credit three times.
Republicans are completely misrepresenting what this bill does, calling the bill's section 2 ``If you like your group health insurance plan, you can keep it.''
Well, first of all, the bill does not require that insurers keep selling these group policies. Insurers discontinue policies every year, and there is nothing in this bill that prevents them from doing so.
But more important, the bill goes well beyond the issue of people keeping plans they have now. Instead, it allows insurers to sell group plans that do not include ACA consumer protection to new customers through 2018.
Once again, the Republicans are misrepresenting what this bill does, and they are simply trying to repeal or undermine the ACA, which has been so successful in expanding insurance coverage, keeping down costs, and eliminating discriminatory practices.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume in order to close the debate.
The frustrating thing for me and for so many of us on the Democratic side of the aisle is that we know how successful the Affordable Care Act has been, and yet the Republicans continue to negate the positive aspects of the ACA and seek to undermine it with the repeal or with legislation like this that would seriously undermine the goals and the success of the Affordable Care Act. I just
want to point out that, since the Affordable Care Act was enacted in March of 2010, 9.9 million private sector jobs have been created.
According to the latest estimates from the CBO, the overall number of Americans receiving employer-based coverage is expected to grow from 156 million in 2014 to 166 million in 2023, and the number of uninsured is expected to fall by 26 million Americans. Also, since Massachusetts enacted health care reforms that were almost identical to those in the ACA, the percentage of employers offering coverage has increased from 72 percent in 2007 to 77 percent in 2010. Since the ACA was enacted, the Nation has seen 4 years of the slowest health care spending growth since recordkeeping began in 1960. Slower growth in health care costs translates into slower growth of employers' health benefit costs, helping businesses and workers save money. Indeed, employers' hourly health benefit costs rose just 1 percent after adjusting for inflation over the year ending in June 2014, near the bottom of the historical range.
In addition to slowing down the rate of growth of health care spending, which is benefiting employers, the Affordable Care Act is also producing premium savings for America's small businesses due to its 80-20 rule. That rule requires that insurers spend at least 80 percent of premiums on medical care rather than on CEO pay, profits, and administrative costs. If an insurer fails to meet this standard, it must pay rebates to its customers. As a result of this rule, according to a recently released report, America's small businesses have saved a total of $2.5 billion on their premiums since 2011.
The bottom line, Mr. Speaker and my colleagues, is that the Affordable Care Act is delivering on the promise of affordable, quality, and dependable health coverage for millions of Americans, but that doesn't stop the Republicans. We can't shake their obsession with undermining the law, and that is what they are doing again with this bill. The vote on this bill will be the 53rd GOP vote to repeal or to undermine the ACA, so I urge my colleagues to vote ``no.''
I yield back the balance of my time.
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