Sen. Portman Issues Floor Remarks on Impact of ACA on Ohio 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
"In my own state of
"To make matters worse, we think these cost increases are continuing to escalate in our state and around the country. In
"Unless we take action, there's no light at the end of this tunnel. The
"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
"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.
"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
"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
"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.
"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
"The nonpartisan
"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
"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
"I've certainly seen this firsthand in
"Susan from
"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
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
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