[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 41 (Wednesday, March 11, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Page S1398]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         HEALTH CARE SUBSIDIES

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, around the country we see a number of 
stories appearing. I will take one of the stories from the New York 
Times and read just a little bit of it. It is a long article, but 
everyone gets the drift of it. There are a few paragraphs I am going to 
read.

       The Obama administration said Tuesday that 11.7 million 
     Americans now have private health insurance through federal 
     and state marketplaces, with 86 percent of them receiving 
     financial assistance from the federal government to help pay 
     premiums.
       About three-fourths of people with marketplace coverage--
     8.8 million consumers--live in the 37 states served by 
     HealthCare.gov, the website for the federal insurance 
     exchange. The other 2.9 million people are in states that 
     created and operate their own exchanges.
       Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the Secretary of Health and Human 
     Services, underlined the importance of subsidies for people 
     in states using the federal exchange--subsidies that could be 
     withdrawn if the Supreme Court rules against the Obama 
     administration in a pending case.
       Administration officials suggested that more than 7 million 
     people could lose subsidies, making insurance unaffordable, 
     if the court ruled that such assistance was unavailable in 
     the federal exchange. The plaintiffs contend that the 
     Affordable Care Act does not allow subsidies in the federal 
     exchange.
       In Florida, nearly 1.6 million people have selected or been 
     automatically re-enrolled in health plans--the largest 
     enrollment of any state in the federal exchange--and 1.5 
     million of them qualified for subsidies in the form of tax 
     credits, which averaged $294 a month.
       In Texas, 1.2 million people selected or were re-enrolled 
     in health plans, and one million of them qualified for 
     financial assistance averaging $239 a month.
       In North Carolina, 560,400 people selected health plans in 
     the federal marketplace, and 515,500 of them qualified for 
     subsidies averaging $315 a month.

  A lot rides on what the Supreme Court does, affecting millions and 
millions of people. If the Supreme Court can't see the absolute clear 
language of that bill, millions of people will lose their health 
insurance, and that would be a tragedy. It would be so very bad if 
suddenly people find themselves with no health insurance after they 
waited for so long to get it.

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