[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 72 (Thursday, April 27, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2575-S2576]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                               Healthcare

  Mr. President, I want to talk about healthcare reform. The 
Republicans came up with a really good idea in 1993. It was introduced 
by John Chafee, the Senator from Rhode Island, and cosponsored by 23 
Senators. It was an alternative plan to HillaryCare in 1993. The 
Republicans got the ideas from the Heritage Foundation, and they turned 
out to be good ideas.
  One provision they included was that every State would have an 
exchange. If people couldn't get healthcare, they could buy their 
healthcare coverage as a part of a large purchasing pool called an 
exchange. The Republican idea from Chafee and others not only had 
exchanges but had sliding-scale tax credits for buying down the 
healthcare for lower income folks to buy down the cost of coverage for 
lower income people. When their income reached a certain level, the tax 
credit went away. That was in 1993, the alternative plan to 
HillaryCare, with the individual mandate. Basically, many folks had to 
be covered, and there would be a fine if they didn't get coverage. We 
can't make people get coverage, but the idea was to get people to get 
coverage.
  The employer mandate was the fourth concept. The fourth concept said 
employers of a certain size--I think it was employers with 50 to 100 
employees--were to provide healthcare to their employees.
  The last piece was that insurance companies could not deny coverage 
to people because of preexisting conditions. That was the 1993 
proposal, courtesy of the Heritage Foundation.
  When Mitt Romney was Governor of Massachusetts, he took that game 
plan, lock, stock, and barrel, and established RomneyCare and it worked 
out pretty well. When we did the Affordable Care Act, we took 
RomneyCare and built on that.
  I will close with this. The piece that needs to be fixed and 
repaired, not repealed but fixed, out of the original Republican idea 
is the idea that the insurance companies need a stable insurance pool 
of healthy people, not just old people and sick people but healthy 
people and younger people as well. There are some ways we can fix that. 
It is one of the fixes we need to make. It isn't all that hard. It 
isn't all that hard, and I will talk about that some other day.
  I appreciate my friend from one of those Dakotas--South Dakota--for 
being patient and waiting. Thank you.
  I yield the floor.

[[Page S2576]]

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.
  Mr. ROUNDS. Thank you, Mr. President.
  My colleague and friend, the Senator from Delaware, is also a former 
Governor, and it is always enjoyable to listen to the experiences and 
clearly the understanding about a number of the issues we have in 
common in terms of things that concern us.
  I remember back in 1993, as well when we were looking at healthcare 
reform in South Dakota, we actually, in our process, adopted the vast 
majority of what was considered to be the recommendations from the 
National Association of Insurance Commissioners--guaranteed 
renewability of policies, guaranteed to be able to move from one group 
insurance product to another group insurance product, a minimum amount 
of premium versus maximum amount of premium by any carrier in any 
single group of policies in one plan. Those provisions actually worked 
for us for a period up until 2009, when ObamaCare became the law of the 
land, and at that point we suffered through the same problems most of 
the rest of America is suffering through right now.
  But there are some things that really do bind us together, and one of 
them is trying to make and produce the best healthcare products for the 
citizens within our different States that we possibly can. I think in 
the U.S. Senate there are enough of us who truly believe we can fix, 
repeal, replace ObamaCare. I think Democrats would like to say we are 
going to fix it. I think Republicans recognize that we are probably 
going to do more of a startover because the basic concept of ObamaCare, 
which was moving more and more into a single-payer system, will not 
work.
  For those of us who believe in the free market, what we want to do is 
take away the regulations at the Federal level, give them back to the 
States, and allow the States to actually experiment and make a more 
competitive healthcare product. That allows for businesses to be able 
to insure more individuals to help pay for their costs. It also means, 
then, you can actually get more individuals to receive the benefits of 
private healthcare rather than being responsible for or at least 
expecting that the Federal Government is going to subsidize with 
Federal taxpayer money their healthcare costs. I think that is part of 
what we need to be concerned with here today.