Health Care Reform
Floor Speech
Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, this past Saturday, open enrollment began for the second round of State-based and Federal exchanges all across the country.
We can think about where we were a year ago today: The government was in shutdown. The Federal Web page where people went to enroll was a blank screen for many. There was frustration all across the country, and a lot of our friends on the other side of the aisle were claiming that this was proof the health care reform law could not work. They claimed it was a failure from the beginning.
Well, a year makes a big difference. It is a year later, and we have 7 million, 8 million people who have insurance on these exchanges across the country. We have lowered the number of people without insurance by 25 percent in a year's period of time. That is remarkable. In my State of Connecticut, where we run the best exchange in the entire country, we have cut the number of uninsured in half in just a year's period of time. That is an even more stunning number. Health care rates of inflation are as low as they have been in most of our lifetimes. The State of Connecticut is actually spending less on Medicaid than it was a year or two ago, and quality is getting better. By most all of the indices that we follow, the number of people who are readmitted to a hospital after a surgery or the number of infections people get while they are in the hospital are all lower than they were when the bill first went into effect.
While a lot of my Republican friends come to the floor with stories about people who have bad insurance with the health care bill, the data clearly is on our side. The data tells only one story that the Affordable Care Act is working. But we have a lot of stories, too--millions of them, as it turns out. I have never denied that there will be people who have bad experiences with the health care system, with the Affordable Care Act, and with the exchanges. But they are in the vast minority. The majority are people such as Christina who is a small business owner from Stratford, CT. Several years ago, she left a job that provided employer-based coverage to start her own business in Bridgeport. It was her dream to start her own business. But as with a lot of Americans who have a dream to start their own business, she was reticent about doing it because she was worried about losing her health care insurance. She stayed insured on COBRA until it expired, and then she went on the individual market. She recalls having to fill out a 15-page questionnaire asking, as she says, ``anything that I had ever remotely discussed with my doctor.'' Unfortunately for her, she got a rejection notice from a carrier that basically just copied and pasted what she wrote in the application and said: Here is your preexisting condition, and that is why you are uninsurable. Her only remaining option was to go into Connecticut's high-risk pool.
While she was shopping around for insurance, she decided to get her annual mammogram at age 40, and the hospital told her they found something suspicious on that mammogram.
Facing a potential cancer diagnosis without health care coverage created an enormous amount of anxiety for her. It was at that moment that it struck her how important it was for people to have coverage. So she went to Access Health, which is our State-based exchange, to look at plans, and she realized she had another option. She found a gold exchange plan. It asked her to pay $430 a month, which was a big difference from the $1,200 per month that she was paying under the high-risk pool. By the way, a lot of the repeal-and-replace crowd say we should replace the exchanges with high-risk pools. Well, for Christina, that was a big financial risk to her. She went from $2,500 a month down to $430. She says: I am thankful that there was a solution for me to be able to keep my business and to have affordable health insurance that can't be taken away.
Now, Christina hopefully is going to be what a lot of people call job creators. She is hopefully going to hire a lot of people for her new business. She is going to do it because she was able to start that new business because of the Affordable Care Act.
On Saturday, the first day of enrollment, HHS said that 100,000 people submitted applications for coverage, and more than 500,000 people were able to log on to healthcare.gov. And more than a million, just since open enrollment has begun, have been window shopping for insurance options. By and large, Web sites across the country are working, and they are allowing people to come back and shop for plans. It is really important that people do come back and shop for plans, because what we know is that the insurance industry likes this bill as well. Now, a lot of people on our side of the aisle don't like the fact that the insurance industry likes this bill so much, but they like it so much that there are about 25 percent more insurers that are offering plans on these exchanges. So if a person is on a plan for a year, they should know there are likely more options out there for them. They should go on the State exchange or Federal exchange and check it out. There are going to be more options with potentially better fits for people.
That is not to say that people haven't been really happy with the insurance coverage they have. Here is some other news we have gotten in since the last time I was on the floor. The Gallup poll surveyed Americans who had bought insurance in the first year on these plans, and what they found is pretty remarkable. Seventy percent of the people who bought insurance in the new marketplace last year rated it as good or excellent. Would that we had the same ratings for the Senate. Seventy percent of the people say the coverage they got was good or excellent. Three in four of the newly insured say they are satisfied with this aspect of their health care insurance. That is compared to 61 percent among the general population with insurance.
So people are actually more satisfied on the exchange-based plans than they are on nonexchange-based plans. If people are satisfied now, they may be able to get an even better deal because more insurers are now signing up.
The other good news is that premiums are going to be, on average, lower. Now, that is an impossible thing to say in the current health care environment. People are just not used to hearing that premiums from year to year are going to be lower, but that is the truth. A study from Kaiser and a study from the Wakely Consulting Group--Kaiser looked at the second lowest-cost silver plan in 49 cities around the country and found the premiums are going to be decreasing slightly from last year. Wakely looked at the largest county in each of the 34 States with marketplaces run by the Federal Government and found on average that the rate decrease was going to be 1 percent. We, frankly, would be happy if rate of increase was only 2 or 3 percent, because on average in 2008, the premium increase was 10 percent. In 2009 it was 10.8 percent, and in 2010 it was 11.7 percent. We are having an average premium decrease in the exchanges this year. That is more proof that as folks get more coverage, as people get access to preventive care, they are driving down overall health care costs because less people get into crisis, less people have to run to the emergency room, and they get cheaper cost care earlier on. That is better for them, better for the taxpayers, and better for their bottom line.
Kara from Granby, CT, has this story. When Kara was born, the doctors immediately told her parents that she was going to face a lifetime of obstacles because she was diagnosed with only one ailing kidney and a slight hearing impairment. Lucky for her, her parents found a great doctor at Connecticut Children's Medical Center.
About the time she was 1 year old, her kidney had started to fail, and a kidney transplant was recommended. Her father gave her one of his, and she was able to graduate from high school and college without having any major health problems. But she remembers always being warned by her parents about how difficult her life was going to be because of her health ailment but also because of the fact that her life decisions were going to be dictated by whether she could get health care. So she was so relieved when she found out she could stay on her parents' plan until she was 26, under the new health care law. That was critical to her because her health, after she graduated college, took a sudden downward turn. She began having frequent headaches, and her voice became really hoarse. What she thought was a virus ended up to be diagnosed as a brain tumor.
Because of the ACA and her parents' insurance, she was able to get great coverage. She went out to go look for a job but wasn't able to find one that offered health care insurance, and she went on Medicaid before she could sign up for health care insurance herself. Her tumor reappeared, but even despite this latest setback, her doctors still believe they can extract the tumor, and her prognosis is good. But she has health care, and she has had continuous health care because of the Affordable Care Act, because of Medicaid's being expanded throughout the States.
Kara says that I know for sure that I wouldn't have made it this far in life without health care. It is incredibly essential to have it. You never know what is going to happen to you. Don't take your health for granted. Kara, from Granby, has health insurance continuously because of the Affordable Care Act. Differences are being made all over the country.
I will tell just one more story. That is one from the middle section of the State from Ohio. Jim worked for 37 years for the same company. He was typically putting in 50-hour workweeks that included travel and working weekends. It started to take a toll on his health, and he knew he had to retire. If he wanted to live longer, if he wanted to enjoy his years in his sixties and seventies, he had to retire, but he couldn't do it because he needed health care for him and his family. His wife is a cancer survivor. She had been diagnosed with leukemia 15 years ago. The only way she was going to be able to get insurance was through his employer. He had to keep working even though it was the wrong thing for his health because of his job lock caused by his necessity to get health insurance from this job he was connected to.
The Affordable Care Act changed all of that. He retired in March of this year. He went and did his home homework on healthcare.gov. The plan he chose would have cost him $1,200 per month to cover him and his wife, but with the subsidy he received, with the tax credit he received, their premium costs were $127 a month. Jim is shopping as we speak for plans in 2015, but he knows he is going to live a longer life, and he will be able to be there for his wife and for his family because of the Affordable Care Act.
Jim has a pretty interesting take on all of this. He says he got to leave his job and spend more time with his family and spend more time concentrating on his health. He says: ``I am much healthier and happier than I was before. Plus,'' he adds, ``I am helping the economy. When I left my job, they had to hire someone else, so I am a job creator too.''
This is one of the great benefits of the Affordable Care Act. It reduces job lock. People who have to stay in jobs, people such as Jim but also people such as the first woman we talked about, Christina, who was able to start her own business because of the Affordable Care Act.
Open enrollment is upon us. People have 25 percent more options. On average, people have premiums that are lower than they were last year. People can sign up for something better than they had or they can join the 8 million people who have signed up on the exchanges and participated in Medicare expansion all across the country. People can be part of this pretty amazing story that is being told all across the country.
An Affordable Care Act that is insuring more people than ever before in this country, contributing to a stabilization of health care costs across this country, that still leaves us with a lot of room to go. There are still way too many people paying way too much for health care, but it at least charts us in the right direction and is making people healthier all at the same time, which is what this is all about. It is not just about saving money. It is about allowing people a better quality of life, and it is doing that as well.
As we mark the coming second week of open enrollment, it is important again to point out a very simple fact, which is the Affordable Care Act works.
I yield back and suggest the absence of a quorum.
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