MURPHY ON GOP HEALTH CARE BILL: “REPUBLICANS SHOULD SCRAP THIS GARBAGE PIECE OF LEGISLATION”
"As Republicans finish up this latest round of secret negotiations, I want to make sure that we remember what
The full text of Murphy's remarks is below:
Mr. President, I've had the good fortune of being in both the House and the
One, that they didn't think the Affordable Care Act was the right approach to fix the problems in America's health care system - 60-some-odd times the House and the
The second thing I heard consistently over that period of time dating from 2009 is that
The
They said their replacement would be better than the Affordable Care Act. CBO says rates will go up immediately by 20 percent on almost everybody. After that, if you're young and healthy, rates will go down, but for everybody else, the amount of money you have to pay in premiums, cospays, and deductibles will go up. There's nothing in the Republican bill about costs - nothing that addresses the underlying issues with an American health care issue that procedure by procedure costs twice as much as most other countries - and there's nothing about quality. There's not a single provision in the bill which encourages higher quality.
So as we get ready for the Republican repeal bill, 3.0 or 4.0, that will be released secretly to
So President Trump said this - he said, "I was the first and only potential
The danger, of course, is thinking that the only thing you pay in the health care system is premiums. I can pretty easily construct a health care reform proposal in which your premium would go dramatically down. How would I do that? I would just shift all of the payments on to the deductibles, on to copays, and I would give you nothing with regard to the actuarial benefit of the plan. So it's easy to get premiums to go down if you don't care about what you're actually covering and the size of your deductibles and the size of your copays.
And then, "Obamacare is in a death spiral." CBO debunks that as well. CBO said if you leave Obamacare in place, two or three million people will lose health care insurance. If you pass the Republican health care bill, that's where the death spiral occurs. Twenty-three million people lose insurance if you pass the Republican bill, two to three million people lose insurance if you don't pass it.
Again,
"At the same time taking care of preexisting conditions." This bill does not take care of people with preexisting conditions. Why? Because it allows for any state to allow insurance companies to get out from the minimum benefits requirement. So if you have cancer, well, technically, the Senate Republican bill says you can't be charged more, but you may not be able to find a plan that covers cancer treatments. So that's not protecting people with preexisting conditions. And CBO says this specifically. They say, especially for people with preexisting mental illness and preexisting conditions, you can't just protect people with preexisting conditions by saying insurance plans have to cover them. You actually have to have insurance plans offer the medical benefit that they need.
And once again, "our healthcare plan will lower premiums and deductibles and be great health care. Insurance companies are fleeing Obamacare. It is dead." I've already covered the part about premiums and deductibles. But let's remember that insurance companies weren't fleeing Obamacare until
In the period of open enrollment covered a period prior to his inauguration and a period after his inauguration. Before
He's made it clear from day one. And i've had the benefit of being on the floor a number of times with
The reality is, yes, some individuals buy insurance today because they are compelled to by the individual mandate, but there's a reason for that. If you don't compel people to buy insurance who are healthy, then you can't protect people who are sick. I sat where the presiding officer is during
There is a mandate and penalty in this bill. It is a far meaner and crueler penalty than included in the Affordable Care Act. What do I mean by that? The Affordable Care Act doesn't mandate that you buy insurance in the sense you don't buy it, you will be locked up in jail. It says if you don't buy insurance, you will pay a penalty on your income tax statement. Okay. If you don't buy insurance, there will be a penalty. That's exactly what the Senate Republican bill says. It says if you don't buy insurance, you will incur a penalty. In their bill the penalty is you will be locked out of buying insurance for six months. If you are sick or even, frankly, if you're healthy and you need to go see a doctor for something, you will have to pay for that out of your pocket for those six months. If you are sick and you have a serious condition and you are legally refused health care because of this legislation, the consequences could be dire.
But whatever the scope of the consequences, it is still a penalty, just like there was a penalty in the bill that the
The nature of insurance is that people who have the good fortune to be healthy or to be free of accident or natural disaster subsidize individuals who are not so fortunate - who are sick, who do have an accident occur to their home, who are subject to a natural disaster. That's how insurance works.
Of the 23 million who lose insurance according to the CBO under the Republican bill, millions and millions of those want insurance but they won't be able to get it because they are priced out by the Republican bill. So I can see there will be some people who will make that choice, but there will be millions more who had insurance today who will not be able to get it moving forward.
As
But that's not what
Alison is 28 years old. She is from
When she was 9 years old, she was diagnosed with a rare liver disease. At the time, she and her family were told that they would need to find a liver transplant in roughly ten years or she wouldn't survive. At the start of her sophomore year at
Unfortunately, none of her family or eight other candidates, friends I think of the family, were a match for her. In desperation, her parents wrote an e-mail and sent it out on a listserv to people that lived in
Now, her family was lucky because she had insurance through her father. She was, because of the Affordable Care Act, allowed to do that at the time being under 26 years old. Her insurance paid for virtually everything that was necessary. But she says, "had my dad not had the health benefits he did, I know my family would not be in the place they are today because my parents would have lost everything that they worked so hard for. There was no way we could have afforded to pay for all of those burdens." And today she worries that if this bill is passed, she - as a young woman with a preexisting condition - will be destined to a life of discrimination because she may not be able to find a plan that covers her condition because of the withdrawal of protection with respect to the minimum benefits requirement.
And even in
Alison is now a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit at
I'm with
And I'll end with this thought. It doesn't have to be like this. Health care does not have to be a political football that is just tossed from one side to the other every ten years. That's what's been happening here for my entire political lifetime. I was elected to
Whether this bill passes or not, the fact that
What if we sat down and fixed the things that aren't working, kept the things that are working, and held hands together and said that we're going to jointly own the American health care system? It would leave plenty of things to fight over. There would still be no shortage of disagreements that we could run elections on, whether it be immigration or taxes or minimum wage. There would still be lots of things that we could disagree on. But for as long as I've been in politics, this issue has just been thrown back and forth to hurt
Hospitals and health care providers have been doing really innovative things since the Affordable Care Act went into effect, because they got a signal from the federal government that we wanted them to start building big coordinated systems of care, that we were going to reward outcomes rather than volume. So they started making all these big changes. Then about a year ago they stopped because
My offer, and I think the offer from most of my colleagues, is sincere. If my Republican friends do choose to throw away this piece of legislation because it doesn't comport with the goals that
I yield the floor. I note the absence of a quorum.
Read this original document at: https://www.murphy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/murphy-on-gop-health-care-bill-republicans-should-scrap-this-garbage-piece-of-legislation
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