Sen. Murphy on GOP’S Latest Disastrous Health Care Bill: ‘My Constituents Deserve a Voice’

WASHINGTON, July 20 -- The office of Sen. Christopher Murphy, D-Conn., issued the following news release:

Just hours after Senate Republicans released yet another version of their disastrous and cruel health care repeal plan, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, spoke on the floor of the U.S. Senate to highlight the dangers of this latest health care bill to Connecticut. Murphy emphasized that the bill breaks every promise Congressional Republicans and President Trump made to improve the health care system, and called on them to work with Democrats to write a bill that actually improves care and lowers costs. Click here to view video of Murphy's remarks.

"This is a terrible bill. It doesn't solve a single problem that Republicans said they were trying to fix. Despite all of the guarantees made by Republicans and this president that under their plan costs would go down, deductibles would go down, premiums would go down, CBO says the opposite. More people lose insurance. Costs go up. Quality doesn't get better," said Murphy.

"Behind closed doors, small changes are being made to this bill to try to win the votes of individual senators, giving them specific amounts of money for their state - and their state alone - in order to win their vote. That is shameful," Murphy continued. "My constituents in Connecticut deserve to have a voice in how one-fifth of the American economy is going to be transformed. We could solve all this if Republicans decided to work with Democrats."

The full text of Murphy's remarks is below:

Colleagues, the new CBO score is out on, I guess, version 4.5 or 5.5 - it's hard to keep track of the bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act - and nothing has changed. This proposal, which was a moral and intellectual dumpster fire, is still a disaster. Here is what CBO says about the bill that is currently being reworked behind closed doors by my Republican colleagues.

CBO Says, that immediately 15 million people will lose coverage by next year. That's a humanitarian catastrophe. It's something that this country has never witnessed before, that number of people losing coverage in that short a period of time. Our emergency rooms would be overwhelmed. They would be unable to deal with the scope of that kind of humanitarian need. Ultimately, the number rises to 22 million at the end of the ten-year window. We know it will be far bigger than that in the second ten years because that's when the worst of the Medicaid cuts happen. It's no different from the previous version which was 23 million, or the House bill that somehow got a majority vote despite 24 million people losing health insurance according to CBO.

Today, 90 percent of Americans are covered by health insurance - CBO Says that number will go down to 82%. I heard Senator Cornyn year after year complaining that the ACA still leaves millions of Americans uncovered. Well, this would make it even worse. When you get down to look at what happens to individual Americans, it gets even more frightening. So let me give you an example of how this bill would dramatically increase premiums on individuals who are currently insured through the private market. A lot of the coverage losses happened because of this assault on Medicaid. But lots of folks who have private coverage wouldn't be able to afford it any longer.

If you're a 64-year-old making, let's say $55,000, that is over three times the federal poverty level. So in a lot of places you can live on $56,000. That individual today is paying about a $6,700 premium. Under the Republican health care bill, that individual would pay $18,000 in premiums. That an increase of 170 percent. And that's just one individual. The bottom line is if you are older and you are less wealthy, you are going to be paying a whole lot more under this proposal.

Despite all of the guarantees made by Republicans and this president that under their plan costs would go down, deductibles would go down, premiums would go down, CBO says the opposite. They say, especially if you are middle income and 50 or older, your premiums will go dramatically up. This is a terrible bill. This is a terrible bill. It doesn't solve a single problem that Republicans said they were trying to fix. More people lose insurance. Costs go up. Quality doesn't get better. This is a terrible piece of legislation. And, Mr. President, we're at this really frightening time in the negotiations where changes are being made to this bill not to improve policy, but to try to win individual votes.

So here's what's happening as we speak. Behind closed doors, small changes are being made to this bill to try to win the votes of individual senators, giving them specific amounts of money for their state - and their state alone - in order to win their vote. That is shameful. And it is no way to reorder one-fifth of the American economy. We're talking about 20 percent of the U.S. economy. And changes are being made to this bill right now that have nothing to do with good health care, have only to do with winning individual votes to try to get to 50.

Because Republicans refuse to work with Democrats. Refuse to work with us. And so instead of building a product that could get big bipartisan support, Republicans are now down to a handful of their members and are trying to find ways to deliver amounts of money to those members' states in order to win their vote. There is a special fund in the latest version of the bill for insurance companies in Alaska that was not in the previous version of the bill. Now all of these provisions get written in a way that if you are an average, ordinary American who decides to take a couple hours of your time to read the bill, you'd never know that it was a specific fund for Alaska because it doesn't say Alaska. It sets up a whole bunch of requirements that a state has to fulfill in order to get this special fund for insurance companies, and only one state fits that description, and it's Alaska.

There is a change in this bill from previous law that addresses states that were late Medicaid expanders, states that expanded into the new Medicaid population allowed for under the Affordable Care Act but did it late in the process. The previous version didn't give those states credit when establishing the baseline for the new Medicaid reductions. But miraculously this new bill has a specific provision to allow for two states that were late Medicaid expanders to be able to get billions of additional dollars sent to their state. Those states are Alaska and Louisiana. Two states.

There is a new provision in the latest version of the bill that makes a very curious change to the way in which disproportionate share hospital program payments are sent to states that helps hospitals pay for the cost of people without insurance. Not coincidentally, it's a change that was advocated by one senator from one state: Florida. The change will disproportionately benefit the state of Florida and it's now in the new version.

These are not changes that help the American health care system. They are not changes that benefit my state or the state of the majority of members here. Some of these changes don't benefit 98 of us. They only benefit two of us, and they are in this version of the bill in order to win votes, not to make good policy.

And we hear word this morning of a new fund that was invented in the middle of the night last evening that would supposedly help states who are Medicaid expansion states transition their citizens who are currently on Medicaid to the private market. Now there are reports that that's a $200 billion fund, and that is a lot of money. It sounds like a lot of money, and it is a lot of money. But it would represent 17 percent of the funds that are being cut to states, and it would only be a temporary Band-Aid on a much bigger problem. Why?

Because CBO says definitively that the subsidies in this bill for people who want to buy private insurance are so meager that virtually no one who is kicked off of Medicaid will be able to afford those new premiums. That's why the numbers are so sweeping in their scale. 22 million people losing health care insurance. And so even if you get a little bit of money to help a group of individuals in a handful of states transition, when that money runs out - and it will - they are back in the same place. All you are doing is temporarily postponing the enormity of the pain that gets delivered. And once again this provision being delivered only to states with Medicaid expansion populations is being targeted in order to win votes - not in order to improve the entirety of the health care system.

Senator Corker called out his colleagues today. He said that he was willing to vote for the motion to proceed, but he was growing increasingly uncomfortable with a bill that was increasingly, I think his word was "incoherent." That's what happens when you get to this point where you have a deeply unpopular bill that everybody in the country hates, and you need to put amounts of money in it to get a handful of additional votes. It becomes incoherent. And this was an incoherent bill to begin with. It's hard to make this bill more incoherent, but that's what's happening as these individual funds are being set up for Alaska, for Louisiana, for Florida.

We could solve all this if Republicans decided to work with Democrats. If we set aside the big tax cuts for the wealthy and the pilfering of the Medicaid program, if we tried to fix the real problems that Americans face today - we could do it in a bipartisan way. And wouldn't that be great?

I get it that there's enormous political advantage to Democrats to sit on the sidelines and watch Republicans vote for a bill that has a 15 percent approval rating just like there was political advantage to Republicans to sit on the sidelines and not do anything to help Democrats provide insurance to 20 million more Americans. Health care is a really thorny political issue. But it doesn't have to be that way. We could sit down together and own this problem and the solution together. And we could end health care being a permanent political cudgel that just gets used every five to ten years by one side to beat the other side over the head.

We're senators too. We got elected just like our Republican friends did. Why won't Republicans let Democrats into the room, especially after this bill has failed over and over again, to get 50 votes from Republicans? We don't have a communicable disease. We aren't going to physically hurt you if you let us into that room. We're not lying when we say that we have a desire to compromise. Democrats aren't going to walk into a negotiating room and demand a single payer health care system. We understand that we're going to have to give Republicans some of what they want. Maybe that's flexibility in the benefit design that's offered on these exchanges. But Republicans are going to have to give Democrats some of what we want, which is an end to this madness, an administration that is trying to sabotage our health care system and destroy the health care that our citizens get. But that could be a compromise. It's not illegal to meet with us. There's 48 of us. There's not 12 of us.

My constituents in Connecticut deserve to have a voice in how one-fifth of the American economy is going to be transformed. And I know a lot of my Republican friends want to do this. I've talked with Republican senators who say, well, when this process falls apart, we want to work with you. It's falling apart. Because the only way that Republicans are going to get to 50 votes is by making these shameful changes, specific funding streams for specific states, in order to get a handful of votes. That's not how this place should work. Maybe this is how things happened here 100 years ago. It's not how things should happen today.

And so once again I will beg my Republican colleagues to stop this partisan closed-door exercise and come to work with Democrats. We can do this together. We can own it together. We'll have plenty of other stuff left to fight about if we find a way to agree on a path forward for America's health care system.

I yield the floor.