[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 101 (Tuesday, July 16, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5713-S5715]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           HEALTH CARE REFORM

  Mr. THUNE. Madam President, last week a letter was sent to majority 
leader Harry Reid and minority leader Nancy Pelosi of the House of 
Representatives, and I wish to read a few quotes from that letter. It 
says:

       When you and the President sought our support for the 
     Affordable Care Act, you pledged that if we liked the health 
     plans we have now, we could keep them. Sadly, that promise is 
     under threat. Right now, unless you--

  Directed at the majority leader and the minority leader in the 
House--

     and the Obama Administration enact an equitable fix, the 
     ACA--

  Or the Affordable Care Act, which some people refer to as 
``ObamaCare''--

     will shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but 
     destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the 
     backbone of the American middle class.

  The letter goes on to say:

       Since the Affordable Care Act was enacted, we have been 
     bringing our deep concerns to the Administration, seeking 
     reasonable regulatory interpretations to the statute that 
     would help prevent the destruction of non-profit health 
     plans. As you both know first-hand, our persuasive arguments 
     have been disregarded and met with a stone wall by the White 
     House and by the pertinent agencies.

  This is a letter that was, as I said, sent last week to the leaders 
in the House and in the Senate. I wish to quote a few more passages 
from that letter.

       We have a problem; you need to fix it. The unintended 
     consequences of the Affordable Care Act are severe. Perverse 
     incentives are already creating nightmare scenarios.
       First, the law creates an incentive for employers to keep 
     employees' work hours below 30 hours a week. Numerous 
     employers have begun to cut workers' hours to avoid this 
     obligation, and many of them are doing so openly. The impact 
     is twofold: fewer hours means less pay while also losing our 
     current health benefits.

  The summary of the letter at the end says:

       On behalf of the millions of working men and women we 
     represent and the families they support, we can no longer 
     stand silent in the face of elements of the Affordable Care 
     Act that will destroy the very health and wellbeing of our 
     members along with millions of other hardworking Americans.

  So when we look at this letter and the tone of the letter and some of 
the statements made in the letter, we see that it talks about 
destroying the health benefits of employees. It talks about nightmare 
scenarios being created by perverse incentives in the Affordable Care 
Act. As I said before, it says the Affordable Care Act will shatter not 
only our hard-earned health benefits but destroy the foundation of the 
40-hour workweek that is the backbone of the American middle class.
  If my colleagues are wondering who sent the letter--one might think 
it came from the National Federation of Independent Business or perhaps 
the National Association of Manufacturers, the chamber of commerce, or 
some business group that obviously has major concerns and issues with 
the implementation of ObamaCare. But that letter came from Mr. James 
Hoffa, who is the general president of the International Brotherhood of 
Teamsters; it was cosigned by Joseph Hansen, the international 
president of the UFCW, and by D. Taylor, the president of UNITE-HERE--
three major union organizations that are very concerned

[[Page S5714]]

about ObamaCare and its implementation and what it is going to mean to 
the health care benefits many of their members already enjoy, as well 
as what it will do to wreck the 40-hour workweek that is, as they 
describe, the backbone of the American middle class.
  So the list goes on of those who have deep and abiding concerns about 
the adverse and harmful impacts of ObamaCare as we approach the 
implementation stage the first of next year.
  As we know, last week the administration announced they were going to 
delay the implementation of the employer mandate. I think many of us 
received that news as welcome news because we have argued that many of 
the penalties associated with the legislation and its implementation 
are going to be very harmful to job creation and to economic growth and 
that we are going to see more and more employers starting not only to 
not hire people but actually to reduce the size of the workforce. In 
fact, a survey of employers around the country suggested that 40 
percent of them were, in fact, doing that. They were not hiring new 
people. Also, 20 percent of the employers in this country were actually 
reducing--laying people off--because of the concerns about the mandates 
included in ObamaCare.
  So the administration reacted to that by saying: OK, we have been 
listening to you. We hear you. We are going to delay the employer 
mandate.
  That is the penalty attached if employers don't offer a government-
approved health plan with lots of bells and whistles and things in it--
things that they didn't believe they could afford. So we get the 1-year 
temporary relief from that.
  But I think the question that has to then be asked of the 
administration is this: If you are going to provide relief from the 
employer mandate, what about everybody else? What about all of the 
other Americans who are going to be impacted and harmed? What about the 
individual mandate where we have 6 million Americans who are, when it 
is fully implemented, going to be faced with a tax of about $1,200?
  We have all kinds of families across this country who are seeing, 
because of the higher taxes and many of the mandates associated with 
the legislation already, higher premiums. In fact, when the President 
took office, he promised he was going to reduce premiums for families 
in this country by $2,500. Well, according to the Kaiser study--and 
they track premiums--since the President has taken office, health 
insurance premiums for families in this country have actually increased 
by $2,500. So when the President made the argument that he would lower 
insurance premiums for families in this country by $2,500, just the 
opposite has happened. We have seen premiums actually go up. I think 
premiums are going to continue to go up as this becomes implemented and 
becomes, ultimately, the law of the land.
  A lot of my colleagues on the other side have said: Why do you guys 
keep complaining about this? It is the law of the land. In fact, it is 
the law of the land, which I think begs the question of, why is the 
administration not enforcing it? Why has the administration been 
delaying implementation of ObamaCare, at least as it pertains to the 
employer mandate?
  I think there are a lot of obvious reasons for that. They got tired 
of hearing about the adverse impacts it was having on the economy and 
having on jobs. We saw the jobs numbers from the month of June, and the 
number of people who have been pushed into part-time jobs was actually, 
in the month of June, up by 322,000 individuals.
  In other words, what we are seeing is that a lot of people who were 
previously full-time workers and who want to work full-time in our 
economy are being pushed into part-time jobs. Why is that happening? 
Well, at least one of the reasons, I would argue, is that under 
ObamaCare the requirements that apply to employers apply to full-time 
workers. So if an employer doesn't have full-time workers--and the law 
defines that as 30 hours a week--if an employer doesn't have people 
working more than 30 hours a week, they are not covered by the mandates 
in the legislation. So what are many employers doing? Many employers 
were then cutting the hours of their employees to get under that 30-
hour threshold so they wouldn't be hit with these costly new mandates.
  What does that mean for the average family in this country? It means 
that fewer and fewer people have full-time jobs, higher take-home pay, 
and more and more Americans are having to do part-time work--probably 
finding two part-time jobs to help pay the bills. That is a crushing 
effect on an economy that is already struggling to recover. A lot of 
people who I would argue want to get back into the workforce are trying 
to find full-time work and are being met with resistance from employers 
because employers are having to deal with these costly mandates 
included in the Affordable Care Act.
  So if we look at the effect, the net result so far of ObamaCare, 
which, again--we have mentioned this many times here--is 2,700 pages in 
terms of legislation and 20,000 pages of regulations--in fact, the size 
of the stack of regulations is now 7\1/2\ feet tall, so it is about a 
foot taller than I am. Just last week another 606 pages of regulations 
were issued in terms of the implementation of this law. Can we imagine 
average Americans trying to comply with 20,000 pages of regulations or, 
for that matter, businesses trying to comply with them?
  There is so much uncertainty associated with this law and the impact 
it is going to have and fears about the impact it is going to have, and 
nothing is being done to make that any easier for most Americans. It 
was made easier for employers last week when the penalty for the 
employer mandate was delayed by 1 year.
  We believe that if they are going to delay the employer mandate for a 
year, we ought to delay the implementation of this law for everybody 
and not just do it for a year. Let's do it permanently. Let's start 
over. Let's do this the right way. It didn't take a 2,700-page bill, it 
didn't take 20,000 pages of regulations, it didn't take a government 
takeover of one-sixth of our economy to try to solve the problems and 
the challenges we have in our health care system today. Yet that was 
the solution the President and our Democratic colleagues in Congress 
came up with. As a consequence, we have higher taxes, we have higher 
premiums, we have fewer jobs, and we have lower take-home pay for many 
Americans.
  I wish to point out in terms of the issue of premiums even the 
administration has acknowledged that some people are going to see their 
premiums rise under the health care reform law. There are estimates 
from the Society of Actuaries study that was released in 2013 that 
showed the State of Ohio's current average cost to cover medical 
expenses for an individual health insurance plan to be $223.
  Based on the proposals submitted to the Department, the average to 
cover those costs in 2014 under ObamaCare is going to be $420, 
representing an increase of 88 percent when compared to--this is a 
study of actuaries--their study. So an 88-percent increase in the State 
of Ohio. That, of course, again was in the individual health care 
market.
  There have been studies done that suggest that the Federal health 
care law, the Affordable Care Act or, as I said, ObamaCare could nearly 
triple premiums for some young and healthy men. The premium for a 
relatively bare bones policy for a 27-year-old male nonsmoker in the 
individual market would be nearly 190 percent higher.
  So I do not think many of the people who are going to be impacted 
have seen the full impact yet. But when it is fully implemented, there 
are going to be lots of other impacts on premiums, adverse impacts on 
people in this country, especially in the individual market. As I 
mentioned earlier, we have already seen significant increases in 
premiums with regard to families.
  So if we look at this thing and sort of assess where we are today, 
not too far, just a few months away from what is alleged to be the full 
implementation of this--of course, now with the exception of the 
employer mandate--I think we can come to one very simple conclusion; 
that is, that the result has led to fewer jobs, it has led to more 
people being pushed into part-time work as opposed to full-time jobs, 
and therefore lower take-home pay for middle-class Americans. It has 
led to higher premiums. We are already seeing the effect of that with 
regard to premiums that are being paid by families and those who have 
to buy their insurance in the individual marketplace.

[[Page S5715]]

  We know there are lots of higher taxes in the legislation. If we look 
at the impact on many people who provide health care services, the 
medical device manufacturers have a big tax they are dealing with, 
pharmaceutical companies, health insurance plans--we can go right down 
the list. All of those new taxes are going to get passed on, in many 
cases passed on to people who are not high-income earners but middle-
class Americans who are trying to keep their heads above water and keep 
health care coverage for their family.
  These are the real-world impacts of ObamaCare as we know it today. 
That is why I think we see, even organizations that are very 
sympathetic to the President, very sympathetic to his agenda, fans of 
his agenda, people who worked very hard to get him elected in office--
the labor unions in their letter make that argument, that they worked 
very hard. They walked the neighborhoods. They did all of the 
grassroots organizing that was necessary to get the President elected. 
Here they are reacting to the Affordable Care Act, to ObamaCare, in the 
same way I think most Americans are.
  That is why we consistently see public opinion polls that are very 
negative toward the law. In fact, there was a Rasmussen survey recently 
that said 55 percent of Americans disapprove of the law, 39 percent are 
in favor of it. But a significant and decisive majority of Americans 
believe this is going to be bad for them, bad for their own personal 
situation, finances, when it comes to covering their families but also 
bad for the economy and bad for jobs.
  Higher premiums, higher taxes, fewer jobs, more part-time jobs, fewer 
full-time jobs, lower take-home pay, that is what we today know as 
ObamaCare. There is a better way. We could go back and start over, do 
this the right way; step-by-step, incrementally, deal with the 
challenges that we have in our health care system, and there are many 
of them. But it did not take a massive takeover of one-sixth of the 
American economy, a massive new government program, 2,700 pages of 
legislation, over 20,000 pages of new regulations in terms of 
implementation to solve the challenges we have in our health care 
system today.
  There is a better way. I hope the feedback, if you will, the response 
that the President and his team are getting, not only now from those 
people who were opposed to it--many of us were arguing when this was 
being debated in the Senate that this, in fact, would be the impact. We 
talked about the impact on premiums because of the mandates and the new 
taxes. We talked about the taxes. We talked about the impact on the 
economy and jobs and pointed out that this was going to have an 
adverse, harmful impact on the ability of our economy to create jobs 
and to get that unemployment rate down and get people back to work in 
this country.
  Many of us were working those arguments. Many of the organizations 
that were opposed to the legislation were saying the same things. Now 
we have those who were actually endorsing and in favor of the 
legislation coming out and saying it would shatter not only our hard-
earned health benefits but destroy the foundation of the 40-hour work 
week that is the backbone of the American middle class. Perverse 
incentives are already creating nightmare scenarios.
  That is what is included in the letter that was submitted last week 
to the leaders in the Congress, written by major labor organizations in 
this country. Those are not rightwing conservatives, rightwing 
Republicans who are reacting this way to ObamaCare; these are allies of 
the President who have realized and come to the conclusion that this is 
incredibly problematic, not only for them and their members and the 
employees of a lot of companies out there with regard to the current 
health care benefits that they already have but also what it means for 
the 40-hour work week and what it means for the take-home pay for 
middle-class Americans across this country.
  We can do better. We should do better. It is not too late. It is 
never too late to do the right thing. I hope that as more and more of 
this anecdotal and empirical evidence comes forward about the 
implementation of this legislation, we will do that.
  I yield the floor.

                          ____________________