[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 48 (Monday, March 23, 2015)]
[House]
[Pages H1842-H1845]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               OBAMACARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. McSally). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 6, 2015, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Texas (Mr. Gohmert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, well, here we are, the fifth anniversary 
of--well, at least this weekend--what many affectionately or 
disaffectionately call ObamaCare.
  It is kind of hard to call it the Affordable Care Act because we--
many of us--know exactly how much jeopardy it has put finances for 
people all over the country. There are some people that are getting 
back enough in subsidies that they like it.
  It is important, I think, as a great followup to my friend from 
Georgia talking about the budget, to follow up and look at the 
predictions that were made 5 years ago about the bill that passed 
without a single Republican

[[Page H1843]]

vote because we had done our homework.
  I did read the bill before I voted against it. I didn't have time to 
enmesh all of the references, the other bills that were referenced in 
the changes that would be made in those bills, but I could certainly 
tell from what was there, what I was reading in the about 2,500-page 
bill, that it was going to be a disaster for health care.

                              {time}  2030

  In any event, here is an article from Sam Baker, ``5 Years In, 5 
Busted Predictions About Obamacare,'' March 22, 2015:

       When President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into 
     law 5 years ago, many Republicans essentially predicted it 
     would grow up to be a serial killer--that seniors, Medicare, 
     private insurance companies, jobs, and the American Dream 
     would die by its hand.
       It has turned out to be far more well adjusted.
       On the other hand, many Democrats thought the law would 
     quickly make it through its awkward phase and turn into the 
     most popular kid in school--liked by most, respected by all, 
     a sophisticated winner, possessed of all the latest 
     technology but also with unassailable principles.
       It has turned out to be a much bigger screwup.

  I might add parenthetically here--into the article--that, actually, 
there were Republicans like me that knew that it was not going to die. 
We knew that it was going to shrivel up the number of insurance 
companies, as it has.
  We knew that Medicare was going to take a hit because ObamaCare cut 
$716 billion from seniors' health care, and even though the President 
and all the king's horses and all the king's men were promising that, 
Gee, that $716 billion in cuts to Medicare, it is not going to affect 
you seniors, they were told. No, no, that is only going to affect the 
health care providers.
  Well, I don't know about the rest of the country, but the seniors I 
talked to around Texas figured out, Wait a minute, if you are not going 
to reimburse the people that provide us health care, we are going to 
have a hard time getting health care. They figured it out. That is 
exactly what has happened.
  Mr. Baker, talking about, I guess, the worst of the projection by 
Republicans--were not what I projected, but there are people that have 
not gotten the care they need. They have been put in dire physical 
straits because of ObamaCare. Some have lost their insurance. I had 
insurance before. I liked my insurance. I liked my doctors. ObamaCare 
changed all of that.
  This article, though, says, ``Say what you will about Obamacare, but 
if nothing else, it's a survivor.'' That is the point, Madam Speaker, 
that is important to note; any kind of socialized medicine is always a 
survivor.
  Some were saying, Oh, we don't have to worry about ObamaCare. It will 
go broke. It will die of its own accord--no, that is what happens to 
socialism.
  But socialized health care, socialized medicine in any form--even in 
this beginning stage, as the President has once said on video, that he 
wanted a single payer--in other words, total socialized medicine, where 
the government gets to tell everybody what they get and pay for it and 
so people get rationed health care, is what it amounts to.
  Socialism dies of its own accord. As Margaret Thatcher once said, it 
eventually runs out of other people's money. Socialized medicine in any 
form does not die of its own volition. It doesn't happen because what 
happens when you are dealing with government-run health care, it 
doesn't die of its own accord, no.
  What happens is people have more and more health care rationed. More 
and more people have health care they don't get because they are put in 
line, like the young man from Canada in my district that said his 
father died of a heart attack because he had been on the list in Canada 
for 2 years and he never got the bypass he needed.
  Until ObamaCare came along, basically, if you needed bypass surgery--
whether it was in east Texas or elsewhere--if you needed it now, you 
were going to get it now; but over time, as the government takes over 
health care, now, you get on a list, like my constituent's father was 
put on a list.
  I said: 2 years, that is incredible.
  He said: Well, yes, people kept getting moved in front of him.
  I said: Well, my understanding was that it was a crime to do anything 
to get yourself moved up the list.
  He said: Well, that is true, but there is a board, a group that 
decides who gets moved up the list in priority.
  They kept moving people in front of his father until he died.
  Anyway, some critics of this article said they didn't even think they 
would need to kill it, just that they could help it along. The law's 
opponents argued for years that the law would never work, predictions 
that reached new intensity when www.healthcare.gov launched in 2013.
  That is not true of all of us. Some of us knew it would not die of 
its own accord. We knew that it is like any government-run health care. 
You just ration it, and people get less of it.
  There is a board--whether anybody wants to acknowledge that Sarah 
Palin had a great point, she did. Whether you want to call it a death 
panel or not, it is a panel that will get to decide the parameters for 
people getting, you know, pacemakers.
  One of my staff had a parent who was told the year before ObamaCare 
kicked in that he could get a pacemaker; after it kicked in, he 
couldn't get a pacemaker. Well, that is the power of the government to 
tell you who lives, who dies.
  ObamaCare is not going to die of its own accord. People may die 
because of the new healthcare laws and the decisions of the death 
panel--or whatever you want to call the IPAB--but they will make 
decisions that will affect people's ability to live.
  Anyway, the article further down talks about the prediction that it 
would get popular:

       ``I think as people learn about the bill and now that the 
     bill is enacted, it's going to become more and more 
     popular,'' Senator Chuck Schumer said in 2010, just a few 
     days after Obama signed the law. ``I predict...by November, 
     those who voted for health care will find it an asset; those 
     who voted against it will find it a liability.''
       Schumer was hardly the only one expressing this optimism. 
     The process of getting ObamaCare passed was brutal for 
     Democrats, but many in the party truly thought the heat would 
     die down between 2010 and 2014 when the law's central 
     provisions kicked in.
       The debate got to a point where there was no way to win the 
     rhetorical wars over health care, so Democrats' plan was 
     largely to get it done, wait it out, and hope people warmed 
     up to the law once it transitioned from a political 
     abstraction to a set of real-world policies, most of which 
     are pretty boring.
       It didn't work.
       The Kaiser Family Foundation has been measuring public 
     approval of the healthcare law every month since it was 
     signed, and the bottom line has stayed the same: people are 
     closely divided over the law and lean against it.
       This month, Kaiser's poll found 43 percent disapproval for 
     the law, compared to 41 percent approval, which is within a 
     few points of most months. There have been a few blips, where 
     approval topped disapproval or where one side cleared 50 
     percent, but they never lasted.

  Anyway, the article goes on. I will skip down to the part, ``If you 
like your plan, you can keep it.'' It says:

       Obama made some predictions he probably shouldn't have, 
     including his promise that people wouldn't lose their 
     coverage because of ObamaCare. For starters, policies sold 
     in the individual insurance market were largely 1-year 
     contracts before the Affordable Care Act. In other words, 
     there was never a guarantee that consumers could keep 
     their same policies.
       Moreover, though, ObamaCare did cause insurers to cancel 
     millions of individual policies, and it wasn't an accident or 
     a side effect. The law set new standards for policies in the 
     individual market. They have to cover a set of ``essential'' 
     benefits, for example, and can't impose an annual or lifetime 
     caps on benefits.
       A lot of plans that existed before ObamaCare didn't meet 
     those criteria, hence, passing a law to make them. Those 
     policies could technically seek ``grandfathered'' status, but 
     it was hard to get. They could barely make any changes in 
     their plan designs without losing that status. And it was 
     hard for a reason: the law set new standards for insurance, 
     and it wanted to shift people into plans that met those 
     standards.
       All of this was entirely foreseeable in 2010 and was even 
     spelled out in subsequent regulations. The political uproar 
     might not have been as bad if www.healthcare.gov had been 
     working when people started to receive their cancelation 
     notices.

  Well, I would submit that it would have been as bad because there 
were a lot of lies about ObamaCare. Yes, there were some dire 
predictions, but I knew that ObamaCare was not going to die of its own 
volition because, when government controls health care, it doesn't.

[[Page H1844]]

  As an exchange student in the Soviet Union, when I saw their poor, 
pitiful health care system in the Soviet Union, I was literally 
thanking God that we had the health system we did in America.
  My family didn't even have anything like insurance at the time 
growing up in east Texas. It was just that we knew that we had good 
doctors. We had a good system. If you got in a bind, you hoped and 
prayed neighbors would help out.
  Then that is where insurance came along, that you could pay a very 
small monthly, quarterly, semiannually, annual premium to insure 
against something unforeseeable so that you could take care of the 
small things; but once the government gets into something, it doesn't 
work so well. The more government gets into it, the worse it is.
  If we don't turn this thing around and get some free market 
competition back in place in health care, allow people to have their 
own relationship with their own doctor of their own choosing, where 
people can actually compare the prices and decide if this doctor or 
this hospital is worth it--one may cost more, one may cost less, but 
you compare the pros and cons. That is what competition is about. We 
haven't had it in health care in many, many years. Why? Because the 
government got involved.
  Now, we do need a safety net, and that is a good thing. That is what 
caring people do, but when the government takes over everything, as 
ObamaCare will undoubtedly eventually do--why? Because if they get to 
dictate health care, then they are going to get to dictate your life.
  An article from John Nolte today points out, number one, ``Premiums 
are 24.4 percent higher than they would have been without ObamaCare.''
  I guess this comes from the New York Daily News: ``'In the Obama 
administration,' candidate Obama boasted in 2008, 'we'll lower premiums 
by up to $2,500 for a typical family in a year.'''
  This article says, ``Not quite. A recent report from the National 
Bureau of Economic Research examined the nongroup marketplace, where 
families and individuals who don't get coverage through work shop for 
insurance. The report concluded that 2014 premiums were 24.4 percent 
higher than they would have been without ObamaCare.''
  Completely wrong--ObamaCare sent the price of insurance dramatically 
up.
  Madam Speaker, I have people ask regularly: Why is my health 
insurance so much more? My deductible is so high. I will never have 
enough money to pay my deductible, and I have got a copay on top of 
that. I don't have as much covered as I did before with my other 
policy. I don't get to choose my doctor--or the doctor I had before 
that I liked, I didn't get to keep him. So why is it costing so much 
more?
  Well, the answer is very easily given. You are paying for lots more 
IRS agents. We knew when ObamaCare passed that there would be 17,000, 
18,000 new IRS agents that you would have to pay for.

                              {time}  2045

  They are not going to ever help you with a head injury or a skinned 
knee, nothing. No. No. They are going to come after you. They are going 
to give you stomachaches and headaches. They are not going to help you 
with health care. And what about all these navigators? They are never 
going to help you with a knee injury or a backache. No. They are going 
to give you backaches because they are going to make it harder and 
harder to figure out what to do, even though they say, oh, they are 
there to help you. When the government workers say they are there to 
help you, you grab your wallet and run for the door.
  But you are paying for so many more government workers who will end 
up being government union workers, and you have to help pay the union 
wages. We always apparently do that, paying for part of the costs of 
the union. That is because Republicans are real good at allowing 
Democrats to have laws that help fund their campaigns. They have done 
it for years. Mallory Factor has a good book out called 
``Shadowbosses'' that explains the concept.
  Well, here is another point from John Nolte's article, number 2, 
``Less Choice for Patients: From 1,232 Private Market Insurers to 
310.'' Rather dramatic, but that was very foreseeable. Many of us 
talked about it. We knew that this would eliminate many of the 
insurance companies. It would eliminate so much choice. The same way 
Dodd-Frank promises, gee, we are going to fix the banking industry. No, 
you are going to make it hard for small banks to compete; and the big 
banks chew them up, absorb them when they can't make it, and then you 
have fewer choices. That is what ObamaCare is doing.
  This article says: ``Prior to ObamaCare, the individual assurance 
market (non-group, non-employer) offered a wealth of choices in health 
care options. ObamaCare has devastated that market, and with it the 
quality of health care. Keep in mind, the cost of premiums and 
deductibles have increased as choice and competition collapsed.''
  ``Patients may also have fewer doctors to pick from. More than 60 
percent of doctors plan to retire earlier than anticipated--by 2016 or 
sooner, according to Deloitte. The Physicians Foundation reported in 
the fall that nearly half of the 20,000 doctors who responded to their 
survey--especially those with more experience--considered ObamaCare's 
reforms a failure.''
  Number 3, ``Deficit Exploded to $1.2 Trillion with a `T'.''
  ``Forget the original lies that ObamaCare would be a deficit neutral, 
or even cut the deficit. The ObamaCare deficit is now in the 
trillions.''
  ``This month, CBO estimated the law's 10-year costs will reach $1.2 
trillion--a far cry from the President's initial promise of $940 
billion.''
  Well, I have to point out, actually, in fairness to CBO, the 
Congressional Budget Office originally predicted it would be over $1 
trillion; but since the President promised it would be less than $1 
trillion, the Director of CBO was called to the White House and, 
magically, after he went back, he reformulated things. I know this 
offends him, but it is still the truth. It is what happened. He went 
back, recalculated, and it was less than $1 trillion. The President 
said: See, there, I told you it would be less than $1 trillion. Then it 
passes, and then we found out, oh, do you know what? It really is more 
than $1 trillion. How about that?
  That is why I think CBO needs competition, and the best thing that 
could happen is if we started encouraging and even gave rewards to any 
entity, whether it is universities or private groups that begin scoring 
bills, if they get within a certain margin. If a bill passes, if they 
get within a certain margin, it would sure beat the heck out of CBO, 
and then you pay them. We need competition scoring bills so that we 
don't have the disasters we had had in the predictions of the cost of 
ObamaCare.
  Number 4, ``Media and Government Lying About ObamaCare Expanding 
Coverage to Millions.''
  ``You keep hearing about how ObamaCare is covering millions, when it 
really isn't. A huge majority of those in the White House and its media 
throne-sniffers are advertising as `newly-insured' are in fact victims 
of canceled policies who were forced into the ObamaCare exchanges. They 
already had insurance and are therefore not `newly insured.'
  ``Even some of those `newly insured' under ObamaCare's expansion of 
Medicaid were once paying for their own insurance. Now they are on the 
government dole.''
  ``Further, as many as 89 percent of the Americans who signed up for 
ObamaCare when the exchanges opened in 2013 already had insurance. In 
other words, many exchange enrollees simply switched from one plan to 
another.''
  So we were told, gee, there are 30 or 40 million people without 
insurance. We have to insure them. That is why we have got to force so 
many tens of millions of Americans into losing their insurance because 
we have 30, 40 million we have to take care of. And what happened? We 
are told, well, maybe 7 million or so, 8 million, they got insurance 
when all these millions lost theirs. That was worth the damage that 
this administration has done and is doing to the best health care 
system in the world?
  Number 5, ``ObamaCare's Deductibles Are Killing Families.''
  ``One of the great untold stories about ObamaCare is that while 
ObamaCare has skyrocketed premium costs in the individual market, 
deductibles have also increased.

[[Page H1845]]

ObamaCare is really nothing more than catastrophic insurance priced 
like regular insurance.
  ``This year, ObamaCare's lower priced bronze plans have a $5,181 
individual deductible and $10,545 dollars family deductible. The more 
expensive silver plan has a $2,927 individual deductible and $6,010 
family deductible.
  ``On top of your monthly premiums, the deductible is the amount you 
have to pay out of pocket before your insurance kicks in. The last time 
I looked, if I enrolled in ObamaCare, my out-of-pocket expenses 
(premiums plus deductible) would exceed $8,000 before insurance started 
paying anything.
  ``One result of this has been an increase over the last 5 years of 
the percentage of people who put off treatment due to cost.
  ``Unless something catastrophic happens to you, in most cases, you 
are still paying out of pocket for all of your health care. On top of 
that, you are paying for premiums that are doing you absolutely no 
good. It is just free money for the insurance companies.
  ``Also, when you are insured, your out-of-pocket expenses are usually 
higher. Most health care outlets offer steep discounts for the 
uninsured.
  ``Basically, ObamaCare is nothing more than a massive tax increase 
disguised as insurance; a massive financial boon to the same big 
insurance companies Democrats have demonized for years; a massive 
redistribution of wealth that primarily soaks the middle class while 
diminishing their quality of health care.
  ``In summation: The ObamaCare victims vastly outweigh the 
beneficiaries. It is not even close.''
  John Nolte, for the Record.
  Then from the Weekly Standard, the Feds say that the cost of 
healthcare.gov is estimated at $1.7 billion.
  Of course, when the disastrous rollout of this government Web site 
happened, we heard from people who really knew what they were doing 
that said: Gosh, we could have done this for just $6 million or so. 
Well, not if you are close friends with the occupants of the White 
House. If you are close friends with the occupants of the White House, 
you are going to run up a billion-dollar bill for a $6 million, $7 
million Web site that doesn't have the security that is required.

  So we are in big trouble here. Health care has not been helped, and 
we have more and more government workers who are telling people who 
know how to provide health care what they can or can't do all to the 
detriment of the patient.
  I think about one of my constituents. He is no longer practicing 
medicine. He was there to help my wife when she first went into labor 8 
to 10 weeks prematurely. He was telling me that he had done a surgery, 
one of the best he had ever done. Because of all his training and his 
many years of experience, he was good at what he was doing. A couple of 
days after the surgery, he got a call from somebody, I think he said in 
Pennsylvania. The guy had no kind of medical degree at all. He is a 
government worker.
  He said: I was looking at your records of your surgery--it was one of 
the best he had ever done of this type. He said: Well, the average is 
over 3 hours, and you only took 59 minutes; and normally you lose over 
3 to 4 pints of blood, and you only lost 10 CCs, so you are going to 
either have to change the records or we can't reimburse you.
  As this honest, experienced, and excellent physician said: I am not 
going to change my records for anybody. He said: Well, then we can only 
reimburse you about one-quarter of what you should have gotten 
otherwise.
  He said: I am not practicing medicine like this. Some idiot doesn't 
even know what he is doing is going to tell me, one of the best 
surgeries I have ever done, that I can't be reimbursed--and he is 
retired. He gave it up. He said: I planned to practice a lot longer, 
but I am not practicing medicine like this.
  So who is hurt? His patients.
  So what happens when you socialize medicine, as we are moving into 
here, well, you have fewer doctors that are as well trained. The best 
and brightest don't apply. We have already seen a drop in the quality 
of people and the numbers of people, I am told, for medical school. 
Good people are still applying, but eventually, as I saw in the Soviet 
Union when I was there, you have people who are physicians. Some are 
like Florence Nightingale, they do it out of a sense of service and 
dedication; but some just because, you know, hey, it is a job.
  As people are finding out, if you are not going to get reimbursed, 
then you are not going to be able to pay back a quarter-million dollars 
of loans for college, medical school, and getting you through the 
internship and residency until you are actually out making good money 
because you are not going to make it as good; therefore, you can't 
afford to go through as many years. So you end up, over the years you 
see the college, the medical school, all these years of training and 
experience squished together.
  What is the result? Well, you don't have as good physicians. But you 
also have wonderful nurse practitioners. You have physician assistants 
that start taking up the jobs that people went through college and 
medical school, internship, and residency, they start picking up the 
slack that you used to have quality, well-trained doctors to do. And 
they are doing a good job, but it lowers further and further the 
quality of care any time the government gets involved to the extent 
that it is now.
  It is not too late. It is 5 years in. It has been a disaster. One 
broken promise after another, after another, after another. I hope and 
pray that people don't have to continue to suffer the indignity of much 
too high health insurance and not near the quality they were getting 
until we get a new President and can finally get a new health care 
system and have true reform. I hope and pray that this President does 
not end up being so stubborn that he will not hear the cries of the 
people across America who are saying: Please, let us have back our 
cheaper health care, our own doctors, and our better policies. That 
should be the conclusion after 5 years of this disaster.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________