[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 74 (Thursday, May 14, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2897-S2898]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               OBAMACARE

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, it is good to see forward momentum on 
trade. That is certainly good for the American people. But there are 
other issues that both parties should want to address, too, such as the 
broken promises of ObamaCare. It would be nice to see more bipartisan 
support there, and I hope we will at some point, because we all know 
that ObamaCare is a law filled--literally filled--with broken promises. 
We all keep seeing reminders of how it failed so many of the same 
people we were told it would help.
  Back in my State in Kentucky, we are seeing how hospitals and their 
patients are feeling the negative effects of this partisan law. That is 
particularly true in the rural areas of my State. A recent report 
showed that ObamaCare's multibillion-dollar attack on hospitals in 
Kentucky is expected to result in a net loss of $1 billion over the 
next few years--a net loss to Kentucky hospitals of $1 billion over the 
next few years.
  These hospitals are expected to lose more money under ObamaCare than 
they are expected to gain in new revenue from the Medicaid expansion. 
And, largely due to ObamaCare, these losses are forcing Kentucky 
hospitals to cut jobs, reduce or freeze wages, and, in some instances, 
even close altogether. We have lost at least two rural critical-access 
hospitals this year.
  Officials report that Kentucky hospitals are suffering partly because 
more than three out of every four Kentuckians who signed up for 
ObamaCare were in fact put on Medicaid, and we know that Medicaid 
reimburses hospitals for less than it costs to treat patients.
  So despite promises that greater access to coverage would decrease 
visits to the emergency room and the cost associated with those visits, 
the vast majority of emergency room doctors now say they have actually 
experienced a surge--a surge--in patients visiting the ER since 
ObamaCare came into effect.

[[Page S2898]]

  In fact, a recent survey reported that thousands of ER doctors have 
actually seen an increase in emergency room visits since the start of 
last year. One physician from Lexington was quoted as saying he had 
seen ``a huge backlog in the ER because the volume has increased.'' He 
went on to say that ER volume rose by almost a fifth in the first few 
months of this year, which is nearly double--nearly double--what he saw 
last year in the same period.
  There are a lot of reasons for these increases, but as one ER 
physician put it, ``visits are going up despite the ACA, and in a lot 
of cases because of it.''
  Volume in the ER is driven as a result of coverage expansion, adding 
a lot of new people, that has largely been born by the Medicaid 
program. As I have said previously, though, increasing coverage doesn't 
guarantee access to care, and prior to Medicaid expansion, Kentucky 
already faced a shortage of physicians participating in Medicaid. Now, 
there are more than 300,000 additional enrollees--adding 300,000 new 
people to an already broken system. So when Americans on Medicaid get 
sick and can't find a doctor, who will treat the Medicaid patients? 
Where do they end up? Of course, in the emergency room.
  Here is how one Kentucky newspaper described it last year:

       That's just the opposite of what many people expected under 
     ObamaCare, particularly because one of the goals of health 
     reform was to reduce pressure on emergency rooms by expanding 
     Medicaid and giving poor people better access to primary 
     care.
       Instead [what is happening], many hospitals in Kentucky and 
     across the nation are seeing a surge of those newly insured 
     Medicaid patients walking right into emergency rooms.

  One Kentucky doctor described it as a ``perfect storm''--a perfect 
storm. ``We've given people an ATM card,'' he said, ``in a town with no 
ATMs.''
  Given ObamaCare's most famous broken promise about Americans being 
able to keep the health plans they liked, it is easy to see how a 
person who had access to good insurance and quality care before 
ObamaCare would find himself or herself forced onto Medicaid and into 
the emergency room today. A recent report found that among certain 
hospitals in Kentucky, as many as one in five individuals covered by 
Medicaid had previously had private health insurance.
  So, unfortunately, it wasn't hard to see this coming. A lot of us 
warned about it. We warned that providing supposed health coverage, 
without actually giving someone access to health care, is really just a 
hollow promise. You could promise coverage, but it doesn't mean 
anything if there is nobody there to care for the people who are 
covered.
  The same could be said of warnings regarding the impact of 
ObamaCare's deep Medicare cuts and the impact of that on hospitals. I 
wish the politicians who rammed ObamaCare through over the objections 
of the American people had heeded these warnings. We made all these 
warnings 6 years ago.
  So this is just one more reminder why ObamaCare is bad for Kentucky, 
why it is bad for the middle class, and why it is bad for our country.
  But here is the good news. The new Congress just passed a balanced 
budget this week with legislative tools that will allow us to begin to 
address ObamaCare's broken promises. I hope President Obama and our 
colleagues across the aisle will work with us to do so.
  We owe the American people more than ObamaCare's broken promises. We 
owe them real health reform that lowers costs and increases choice.
  I hope our friends across the aisle will work with us in a bipartisan 
way to help achieve that important outcome.

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