Sen. Murphy: ‘Graham-Cassidy Is Being Rushed Through in Dead of Night, With No Time for Americans to Review It’
"Graham-Cassidy is being rushed through in the dead of night, with no time for Americans to review it. Proponents of this bill are trying to contend that it still protects people with preexisting conditions. It does not. Rates will skyrocket for sick people or anybody who has ever been sick. 32 million people are going to lose insurance," said Murphy. "That is a humanitarian catastrophe, and nobody knows it because this bill is being pushed through without any debate, without any CBO score."
Murphy continued, "We are ready to sit down, once again, and try to work something out that gets
Full text of Murphy's remarks is below:
Mr. President, let me associate myself with the remarks of the senator from
We have brothers and sisters all throughout
CBO just released a scaled-down analysis, noting that there was no way they would be able to provide a full analysis given the compressed schedule, given the need to pass this by the end of this week because of
Federal spending on Medicaid would be reduced by
CBO unsurprisingly says that the number of people with comprehensive health insurance would be reduced by millions, and they predict that states would allow insurers to set premiums on the basis of an individuals' health status. None of that is news to people who have read this piece of legislation.
I want to talk for a second about why CBO comes to those conclusions and why this is the most dangerous version of the bill yet.
In this bill is a massive reordering of the American health care system. The health care exchanges, which right now insure millions of Americans across the country, are essentially eliminated under this bill because the whole reason they existed was to funnel tax credits that are attached to individuals based on their income to help them buy insurance. Those tax credits go away under this proposal; thus, the exchanges go away.
Medicaid as an entitlement is ended by this bill. No longer will you as an individual have a payment from the federal government attached to you because of your income or your health status or your disability. States will now get a block sum of money to do essentially what they wish, which may or may not cover the same number of people today covered under Medicaid.
While proponents of this bill are trying to contend that it still protects people with preexisting conditions, no one is buying it, no one is believing it, because on the face of the text, it does not. It is important to explain why that is.
While technically it is up to the states as to whether they protect people with preexisting conditions, under this new version, states can just sign a form that allows them to permit insurers to price based on medical acuity again - meaning charge sick people more. They will have to exercise that option under this version of Trumpcare. They will be forced to exercise that option because what is also eliminated by this version of Trumpcare is the requirement that healthy individuals buy insurance. You cannot require insurance companies to charge sick people the same as healthy people if you don't provide incentives for healthy people to sign up. There is no incentive, at least under the latest version of the bill that I read. Thus, anybody who has taken a semester's worth of education on insurance practice will tell you that states will be faced with two choices: one, reimpose their own individual mandate - and I am going to guarantee you that based on the vitriol that has been launched against the individual mandate from
CBO and JCT [
This bill is a massive reorientation of the American health care system, the elimination of Medicaid as we know it, the end of the health care insurance exchanges, the end of the tax credits to help people buy health care insurance, and the end of the mandatory national protections for people against abusive insurance practices. We are potentially going to vote on this later this week without a CBO score, with one hearing, with no markups.
I don't care how mad my Republican friends were about how the Affordable Care Act was passed. That was done in an open process, with dozens of hearings, with markups in every committee, with 30 days of debate on the floor of the
None of that is happening on Graham-Cassidy. This is being rushed through in the dead of night, with no time for Americans to review it, no time for members of this body to look at it, and no ability for any senator in the Democratic party to be able to have any input into the final product. This is nothing like what happened on the Affordable Care Act. No matter how mad you are that in the end you couldn't vote for it,
Because there is no CBO score, we have to rely on outside independent groups to size up the potential disaster of this bill. The
I have had this chart up here for 3 or 4 months, and I have had to adjust it over and over again because it started out with 23 million people losing insurance as we analyzed the first Republican repeal bill. Then, when the new version came in, you can see I had to write in 22 million people because the amended version that we were going to vote on right before the break was 1 million better. I had to redo my chart based upon this analysis of Graham-Cassidy, resulting in 32 million people losing insurance. Thirty-two million people. It is hard to understand how many people - 32 million people - will be losing insurance over the course of 10 years. That is the total population of
Forgive me, I had to do my own artist's rendering of these states because the data is coming in so fast and the vote is coming so quickly, I didn't have time to have this chart made up again.
That is 32 million people. Think about that. Over 10 years, the equivalent population of all of these states - what is that, 17 States, 19 States - all losing health care at the same time. That is a humanitarian catastrophe, and nobody knows it because this bill is being pushed through without any debate, without any CBO score. That is what could happen if this passes.
It is no surprise that basically everybody in the American health care system opposes this piece of legislation. The proponents cannot find a single verifier inside the medical community for this piece of legislation.
This morning, I heard
Well, that is a little unfair because the status quo for groups like the
I think it is actually worthwhile for just a second - bear with me - to just give a quick sense as to how many people in the medical community oppose this bill. Here is just a beginning list:
That's sort of the tip of the iceberg. You are not really in good company if you are supportive of this bill when every single medical association, every single patient advocacy organization, every single hospital association, every single insurer thinks that you are wrong. You would like to think there might be a couple of these groups who would think it was a good thing to pass a bill that uninsures potentially 32 million - maybe 25 million, maybe 22 million - and jeopardizes preexisting protections for millions of Americans.
What is so bonkers about this is that we were this close to getting a bipartisan agreement. It is not as if there wasn't another path. I sit on the HELP Committee. I had half a dozen conversations with
I saw Leader McConnell's tweet from earlier today in which he said that
That is not true. That is not true, and everybody here knows that it is not true. Why? Because
I am certainly raw at the fact that
My constituents are not happy with the American health care system. They like a lot of the things the Affordable Care Act did, but they acknowledge there are still lots of problems that need to be solved. Amongst those constituents in my state who like what the Affordable Care Act has done but who still want to see changes are Isabelle and Rylan.
Isabelle first wrote about her son to my office 2 days after the last election. This is Rylan, who was born with a congenital heart defect. He looked healthy when he was born. He and Isabelle had been scheduled for discharge from the hospital when Rylan went in for some routine testing, but he never came back. His parents kind of knew something was up, but when the doctors arrived back in their room, they told Isabelle and her husband that Rylan needed to be rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery because his body was not getting enough oxygen, and there was something wrong with his heart. He was diagnosed with several severe heart defects, and he required emergency open-heart surgery.
The first thing Isabelle thought was: how are we going to pay for this? Does insurance cover it?
She found out, much to her relief, that insurance did cover it, because insurance was required to cover things like hospitalizations under the Affordable Care Act and that they would not lose coverage, because no matter how big the bills got, the Affordable Care Act prohibited insurance companies from cutting her off.
Isabelle has been a warrior in preserving those protections in the Affordable Care Act, and I just want to leave you with an email that she sent me this week.
She writes that she is exhausted and that she is so tired of having to fight over and over and over again for Rylan. She feels that no matter what she tries to do, this repeal is going to happen, regardless of Rylan's story, and that they are just going to be casualties of this political imperative to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
In 3 weeks, Rylan is going to be going up to
This is not a game to Isabelle and to Rylan. This is not about politics. This is about this little boy's life. I am going to tell you that my state cannot hold this together if you cut federal funding for health care by 50 percent to
She writes: "Every time the repeal comes up - what is it, the third time or more - I feel sick with anxiety. How quickly the rug will be pulled from under us. How quickly the bricks will begin to fall."
We are ready to work with you. We are ready to sit down, once again, and try to work something out that gets
Please give this up. You are ruining the lives of these families who, in addition to having to save their children's lives, are having to become full-time political activists to stop this from happening. We can do this together. We can deliver peace of mind to these families. It is not too late.
I yield the floor.
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