[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 173 (Tuesday, December 1, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Page S8198]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          AFFORDABLE CARE ACT

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, my friend the Republican leader has an 
obsession with the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare. He cannot give up on 
this obsession. The share of Americans without insurance is at the 
lowest point in history. And one need look no further than renowned 
Republican--Republican--columnist of the New York Times, David Brooks. 
Here is what he wrote. I am sorry to take so much time reading 
something that was written by this man who is a Republican columnist 
for the New York Times. Here is what he said. Regardless of what the 
Republican leader may claim, the Affordable Care Act continues to work. 
It is increasing quality health care coverage and improving care, and 
there is no question about that. Brooks noted that health care costs 
are rising at the lowest rate in years. He said:

       The good news is that recently health care inflation has 
     been at historic lows. As Jason Furman, the chairman of 
     President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, put it in a 
     speech to the Hamilton Project last month, ``Health care 
     prices have grown at an annual rate of 1.6 percent since the 
     Affordable Care Act was enacted in March 2010, the slowest 
     rate for such a period in five decades--

  Fifty years--

     and those prices have grown at an even slower 1.1 percent 
     rate over the 12 months ending in August 2015.''
       As a result of the slowdown in health care inflation, the 
     Congressional Budget Office keeps reducing its projections of 
     the future cost of federal health programs like Medicare. As 
     of October, projections for federal health care spending in 
     the year 2020 were $175 billion lower than projections made 
     in August 2010. That would be a huge budget improvement.

  ``Historic lows'' and hundreds of billions of dollars saved by the 
Federal Government tell me that ObamaCare is working.
  Enough of this haranguing about ObamaCare from my Republican friend. 
One need only go home and people come up to you and say: You know, 
ObamaCare is so good.
  My daughter, who could never get health insurance because she was a 
diabetic--now she can get it. No one with a preexisting disability can 
be denied insurance. Young men and women struggling to finish their 
college education can stay on their parents' health insurance until age 
26. That is important. That is part of ObamaCare. Community health 
centers around this country are booming. Why? Because of the Affordable 
Care Act, we put $11 billion in there to provide for those essential 
community health centers.
  I will have more to say about this because I am sure the Republican 
leader is going to come and talk about what a great victory it was on 
this reconciliation, which is an anomaly that we face every year. They 
are passing something that is just to satisfy the haranguing about 
ObamaCare. It means nothing substantively. It will pass and go to the 
President. He will veto it in about 10 seconds, and, of course, the 
veto will certainly be sustained.
  Even in Kentucky--here is what one article said in Kentucky:

       In a state of 4.4 million people, 500,000 people gained 
     coverage because of [ObamaCare in that State]--4 in 5 through 
     Medicaid. The effects were particularly dramatic in one 
     Appalachian county, where many coal jobs have vanished and 
     the poverty rate is 23 percent. From 2013 to 2014, the 
     proportion of residents lacking health coverage plummeted by 
     half--from 13 percent to 6.6 percent.

  Half a million Kentuckians are using the Affordable Care Act. That is 
more than 10 percent of the State's population.
  There are all kinds of personal accounts of how this has literally 
saved people's lives. One account is of an uninsured mother and 
daughter. This is from a news article:

       Amid the coal fields of eastern Kentucky, a small clinic 
     that is part of the Big Sandy Health Care network furnishes 
     daily proof of this state's full embrace of the Affordable 
     Care Act.
       It was here that Mindy Fleming handed a wad of tissues to 
     Tiffany Coleman when she arrived, sleepless and frantic, with 
     no health insurance and a daughter suffering a 103-fever and 
     mysterious pain. ``It will be all right,'' Fleming assured 
     her, and it was. An hour later, Coleman had a WellCare card 
     that paid for hospital tests, which found that 4-year-old 
     Alexsis had an unusual bladder problem.

  Quoting another Washington Post story:

       [Dennis Blackburn] has a hereditary liver disorder, 
     numbness in his hands and legs, back pain from folding his 6-
     foot-1-inch frame into 29-inch mine shafts as a young man, 
     plus an abnormal heart rhythm--the likely vestige of having 
     been struck by lightning 15 years ago in his tin-roofed 
     farmhouse.
       Blackburn was making small payments on an MRI he'd gotten 
     at Pikeville Medical Center, the only hospital in a 150-mile 
     radius, when he heard about Big Sandy's Shelby Valley Clinic. 
     There he met Fleming, who helped him sign up for one of the 
     managed-care Medicaid plans available in Kentucky.

  So the facts never seem to get in the way of my Republican friend 
when it comes to ObamaCare--anything he could do to denigrate this 
system that is helping 17 million people.

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