Portman Delivers Floor Remarks on the Impact of Obamacare on Ohio Families

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) delivered remarks on the Senate floor today to discuss ObamaCare and the path forward to lower costs and providing better health care options for Ohio families. Portman outlined how the law has not kept its promises to the American people, imposing higher costs on millions of families already hurting from a weak economic recovery. In his speech, Portman shared stories from Ohioans who have been adversely effected by the rising costs and lack of choice that have resulted from Obamacare. "Republicans and Democrats alike," said Portman, have to "figure out a way to [replace] it together to make sure the people we represent have a chance to get the health care they want for their families."

Transcript of the speech can be found below and a video can be found here https://youtu.be/eJmD7Fl5EMk.

"Mr. President, I enjoyed listening to the comments of my colleague from Utah about the Affordable Care Act and some of its problems. I wanted to expand on that a little if I could. I know we're having a discussion right now about whether to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act and we're focused a lot on what the time frame might be and what the replacement might be--which is appropriate--but we also have to remind ourselves as to how we got there. We got here because the Affordable Care Act has not met its promises and it has let down the people of Ohio and the people around this country. Millions of these families have already had a tough time experiencing really a middle class squeeze of flat wages, even declining wages on average over the last decade or so and now higher costs. And that squeeze is accelerated by the costs of health care which have gone up dramatically.

"In my own state of Ohio, the Ohio Department of Insurance has now reported a 91 percent increase in the individual market in Ohio in the last six years, an 80 percent increase for small businesses that are purchasing Affordable Care Act compliant plans. This is since the Affordable Care Act went into effect. So think about that. Almost a doubling of health care premium costs. Who can afford that? People certainly can't afford it as their wages are flat or even declining on average. Nationally, according to the Kaiser Family Health Foundation, average family premiums since the Affordable Care Act was put into place have increased by more than $4,700. You recall one of the promises of the Affordable Care Act was that costs would go down on average of $2,500 per family. It's just the opposite that's happened, in fact almost doubling of that to a $4,700 increase. I don't think families have gotten that kind of pay increase. That would be an 80 percent, 90 percent increase to be able to afford that. They certainly haven't in Ohio. This is a huge problem.

"To make matters worse, we think these cost increases are continuing to escalate in our state and around the country. In Ohio, premiums for this year 2017 are on average 13 percent higher than 2016: a double-digit increase in one year. For two plans in particular, premiums went up by about 39 percent in Ohio. For some families, much worse than that. We've had good leadership in Ohio in Governor Kasich and Lieutenant Governor Mary Taylor, who is also the Insurance Commissioner for our state. Because of that, I believe we've done a better job of trying to control these costs, but in many parts of the country the situation is even worse. Nationally, premiums are increasing by about a quarter just this year, 25 percent in one year. In Arizona they're doubling. In Tennessee they're rising 63 percent. Pennsylvania, right next door to Ohio, 32 percent. I could go on and on. I'm sure North Dakota has had similar problems as the presiding officer can tell us about. Some people, you know, might be able to afford these higher premiums but a lot of people can't afford it. I heard Senator Hatch talking about having to make a choice between paying your rent and paying your premium. That's what I hear back in Ohio as I talk to people who are already struggling and are now hit with these huge expenses.

"Unless we take action, there's no light at the end of this tunnel. The Congressional Budget Office, which is a non-partisan group up here in Congress, and the Joint Committee on Taxation project that unless we do something to change the status quo premiums will continue to skyrocket. They say they'll grow at least by 5 percent each year over the next decade. That's far faster than they assume wages are going to grow. Again the squeeze continues.

"The law was advertised as something that would 'bend the cost curve,' meaning seeing a reduction in the cost of health care. But health care costs have gone up, not down. On top of that the American people have had to pay hundreds of billions of dollars every year in taxes for this new law. There are 19 tax increases in the Affordable Care Act. Some of these--like the Cadillac tax--are very unpopular even among Democrats and Republicans. Hopefully we can deal with that with any kind of repeal effort immediately.

"Another goal of this law was supposed to be increasing access to health care. Let's talk about that for a second. I heard different things on the floor this week about that. About six million people lost health insurance that they liked as a direct result of this law going into effect. So about six million Americans are told your coverage is no longer adequate, it doesn't meet the mandates, you're going to lose your coverage. President Obama told the American people I'm told 37 different times that if they liked their doctor, they could keep their doctor. Of course that turned out to not to be true. When you lose your health care plan and lose your doctor, you don't feel like those promises have been kept. The outside fact checker called PolitiFact, rated that as the Lie of the Year for 2013--that's the outside group that looks at what we elected officials say about what's going to happen and compare it to what actually happened. And by the way, it's still not true. One in five Obamacare customers were forced to find a new insurance company for this year. For this year. So the Congressional Budget Office I mentioned, this Joint Committee on Taxation, these are nonpartisan groups, they now project that 27 million Americans are still uninsured today. And under the status quo, if we don't take action, they say that will be the case for the next decade. So this notion everybody is going to get covered just hasn't happened. By the way that's about one in ten people in our workforce even after hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars have been spent on the Affordable Care Act including these 19 new tax increases.

"A lot of people have told me, Rob, I have health insurance but I really don't because my deductible is so high. So forgetting the premium for a second that you pay for health care, just the annual deductible has gone out of sight. There's some plans where the deductible, as you know, for a family might be $8,000, $9,000, $10,000 a year. That's not really health care because you end up paying all that money out of pocket. The average deductible for a mid-level plan under Obamacare according to the Kaiser Family Foundation went up from $2,500 last year 2014, the year before last now, to more than $3,000 last year, an increase of about a quarter in just one year. So you see this increase also in the deductibles, the copays, not just in the premium.

"National insurers have lost billions of dollars on the Affordable Care Act exchanges and a lot of them have just pulled their plans from the states. This is a real problem because if you don't have competition and choice out there, you're not going to get the costs down. I will say in my own state of Ohio, we've lost nearly a third of the companies on our exchanges just this year. We've gone from having 17 companies offering insurance on the exchanges in 2016 last year to this year just 11. So 17 companies down to 11 companies. We now have 20 of our counties out of 88 counties Ohio, 20 of our counties where there's only one insurer. By the way, this is true nationally. About one-third of the counties around the United States now only have one insurer. Again this leads to higher costs, less choice, less competition. Quality also goes down because you don't have that kind of competition for the beneficiaries. It also of course affects this issue we talked about of premiums going up, deductibles going up, copays going up and the middle class squeeze.

"So the president's health care law certainly failed at its own goals that were laid out, the promises that were made. It made it harder to create jobs, too, which is a different issue really. What is the economic effect of this? Of course having more people covered is a good thing. We all want that but, what's the economic impact of the way that the Affordable Care Act was put into place? We're looking at the weakest recovery since the Great Depression. Unfortunately we haven't seen the kind of strong economic growth that we all hope for and had anticipated after a deep recession. One of the reasons for that in my view is health care. Health care costs going up dramatically, not being able to get ahead, smaller businesses having higher and higher costs.

"When you look at the latest jobs report, it's interesting. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that 5.7 million Americans now are stuck in part-time work who want full-time work. People are looking for a full-time job but can only find a part-time job. Why is that? The economy is not working as it should, it's not generating enough growth to create job opportunities full-time, but it's also because of these mandates under the Affordable Care Act. And I can tell you, you know, economists may differ on the impact of this but go talk to people about it. I was in Chillicothe, Ohio a few months ago. A woman came up to me and said 'Rob, can you help me? My employer says I can only work 28 hours a week.' I figured what it was about. She was a fast food employee but I asked her, 'well, what do they say?' She said health care. So what does that mean? It means under Obamacare if you work under 30 hours a week, you're not covered by the mandates and new costs. Some employers are saying well, we're going to keep you under 30 hours a week. That's led to more part-time work. In this particular case the woman said I have to find another part-time job. I have kids at home, it's tough. I said, an answer in part to this is change the health care law, to make some of the requirements and mandates and make it pro-growth and pro-jobs rather than the current situation.

"There are tens of thousands of new pages of regulations in this law...I'm a small business person. I devoted a lot of time and effort to figure it out. You go to the consultants on the outside, pay them a bunch of money and they tell you they're not sure what it means either. This is one of the big issues that doesn't get talked much with the Affordable Care Act but it's just really hard for a business to figure out what they're supposed to do, particularly small businesses that don't have that kind of expertise and professionals in house. So those costs instead could go toward more employees. They could go toward reinvesting in the business, plant equipment but they're going to try to figure this thing out.

"I don't doubt the good intentions of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who support this legislation. Again, we all want to see more coverage. We want to see health care costs go down, but that's not what's happened. Before the Affordable Care Act went into effect, the CBO estimated 26 million Americans would be enrolled in a plan in 2016. That's what they estimated: 26 million would be enrolled in a plan in 2016. The actual number was 12.7 million, less than half of that. So again it hasn't met its own promises and its own projections.

"The co-ops are another failure. For those of you who follow this closely, you know there was a debate on the floor just before I got elected but it was about should there be a public option so that everybody would have an option to get into an exchange. Let's put together the co-ops, the nonprofits, set them up all around the country. There were 23 co-ops set up, including one for Ohio. We now see 15 of the 23 co-ops have gone insolvent, 15 of the 23. I will tell you last spring when 22,000 Ohioans lost their health care because the co-op went belly up, it was tough because they had to scramble and find a new health care plan quickly. More than 860,000 Americans--people encouraged by this law to sign up for these co-op plans--have had to scramble to find new coverage because of a failed co-op. So it's tough on these families. It's also tough on the taxpayer. We did an investigation of this under the Permanent Subcommittee of Investigations. We looked at what happened to the families and looked at what's happened to the taxpayer. At that time only about half of the co-ops had gone under, rather about than two-thirds, and $1.2 billion of taxpayer money had already been spent on these co-ops. That money isn't coming back to the treasury, meaning this is money that will probably never be repaid again. Part of the problem with our debt and deficit is that the Affordable Care Act has been so expensive and these co-ops in particular just wasted money. Among the surviving co-ops, three have not yet enrolled 25,000 members. In other words, they aren't enrolling a lot of members even if they are surviving.

"The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, GAO, issued report in March that confirms the results of our investigation and it indicates that this money, the $1.2 billion has now increased substantially because more of the co-ops have gone under. By the way, many of those 22,000 Ohio families in the co-op had already paid deductibles on the plans they thought they could count on. Think about it. They already paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in health care costs to get up to their deductible and all of a sudden they find out they've got to go to a new plan and they've got to start all over again. So it's sort of adding insult to injury. They lost their plan. You have to scramble to find one and find out I have these out of pocket expenses again because although I met my deductible on the old plan I have to start over with the new plan. This is not the way it ought to be. It's not fair. These families did nothing wrong. All they did was what they were told to do which is sign up for these co-ops.

"I think these are just symptoms of the problem. I think the diagnosis is clear, which is the health care law is a bad law, it's bad economics, and it's bad health care policy. It just hasn't worked. It's difficult to make the other argument. The president's health care law hasn't worked, not that it didn't have good intentions because it tried to achieve those good intentions by forcing millions of people to buy a product they didn't want, often after losing a product they did want, including a $2 billion taxpayer funded website that didn't work. As you may recall, you remember all the problems with the Affordable Care Act website that potentially exposed a lot of personal information unfortunately of many of these individuals to hackers. As I talked about, even those who have insurance often have limited access to providers because the deductible is so high they just can't afford their health care.

"With higher costs and fewer choices the American people by and large are dissatisfied by this plan, the Affordable Care Act, just as they have since this was enacted. There was a CBS poll done just last month that showed that more Americans disapprove of the law than approve of it. A Gallup poll in November found that eight in ten Americans want the law repealed or significantly changed, eight in ten Americans. Why? Because they've seen it. By the way, most Americans are not in the exchanges but they felt it, because think about this. When a company is involved in the exchanges and is losing money--and many of these companies are losing hundreds of billions of dollars a year--what they're doing is cost shifting on to private plans--on to employer-based plans-- and raising the costs for other Americans. This is part of the reason why health care costs have gone up generally, not just on the exchanges but overall.

"I've certainly seen this firsthand in Ohio. Constituents have been contacting me for the last six years to tell me how this health care law is affecting them. A father of five who wrote to me after the cost of his family's insurance doubled. Another man saw his hundred dollar deductible soar to $4,000. These folks just can't afford it, period. I still remember the letter I received from Dean from Sandusky. He lost his job in 2009 like so many other Americans did during the recession. Because he lost his job he had to go on the individual market to buy health care insurance. He picked out a plan that worked for him, his family and him. He liked it and he bought it. Once the president's health care law went into effect that plan was discontinued because it didn't mean the mandates and requirements of the new law. He found himself high and dry, had to find another plan. He had to buy a plan twice as expensive and it cost him more than half of his pension because that's his income--his pension. Not only did he lose his job, but then he was saddled with a much more expensive cost of living with a plan he couldn't afford. He didn't do anything wrong, but because of a failed, mistaken approach that Congress took to health care reform, he's got to struggle to make ends meet.

"Susan from Batavia also wrote to me. She's a single mom. She lost her plan that she liked because of the president's health care plan. She wrote, I stay in shape, watch my diet, exercise regularly, did all the right things, had a plan I liked, high deductible, lost-cost plan, but under the president's new health care law I had to change my plan. Her coverage was for double the price. For a single mom, that's tough to afford. Another Susan from Columbus, Ohio, wrote to me and told me she works for a small business with 12 employees. When the health care law went into effect, rates went up nearly 30 percent in one year. Small businesses and new businesses cannot afford this. I cannot tell you how many new businesses I went to where I asked them, what have your premiums done over the past few years? And they tell me, double-digit, Rob. If we get an increase in the low double-digits, that's a good thing. You know, again, there is no place for that to come from except for wages and benefits and cutting back on employees. In some cases, again, not expanding plant equipment they would want to otherwise because of this health care law.

"It doesn't have to be this way. We can enact real health reform that uses the market forces that help to increase competition, that require insurance companies to compete for our business. That will allow people to get the plan that they want looking all around the country for what works best for them.

"This burdensome health care law is standing in the way of those reforms right now. It is hurting middle-class families in Ohio and across the country. The health care market was far from perfect before this law, so I'm not arguing that the status quo is acceptable. I do think we have to do things not just to repeal Obamacare, but to replace the Affordable Care Act with reforms that make better sense because we had issues before. But it's gotten worse, not better. It accelerated the problems. So I hope that over the next couple of months as we talk about this we will be able to come up with a replacement plan that makes sense. Republicans and Democrats alike need to come to the table on this because, again, I've listed today all the reasons that the current law is not working, the status quo is not acceptable. I think it's very hard to argue that it is. That means that all of us have a responsibility to say okay, how do we fix this? How do we come together? Republicans and Democrats alike, not on a partisan basis as was done last time but let's figure out a way to do it together to make sure the people we represent have a chance to get the health care they want for their families for them, that fits them, where they can have costs that are affordable, where they can have quality that takes care of themselves and their family, where it can be patient centered and we can give people the affordable care that deserve."

NOTE: Portman has led the effort in exposing the failures of the Affordable Care Act's Consumer Operated and Oriented Plans (CO-OP) program. With the announced closing of Ohio's CO-OP InHealth Mutual, nearly 22,000 Ohioans have to scramble for new health insurance coverage while facing rising health care costs, despite having been encouraged by the Obama Administration to enroll in the Obamacare marketplace and to trust in its plan options. Portman has been demanding answers, saying that the Administration "owes these Ohio families a solution to a problem it created."

Read this original document at: http://www.portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=67646464-C363-4114-8FFA-E93FEB957232