[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 186 (Wednesday, November 20, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6688-S6690]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Health Insurance Plans
Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, as the ranking Democrat on the Senate
Finance Committee, I can tell the Senate this morning that there is no
higher priority for Senate Finance Democrats than the well-being of
healthcare patients in this country and how strongly we feel about
their having a right to good quality, affordable healthcare coverage.
Right now, too many of those folks are getting ripped off by an
insurance lobbyist's dream--taxpayer-funded junk insurance--or by Big
Pharma, which is always, always looking to engage in price gouging for
one reason: They can get away with it. Take insulin. Insulin prices are
up thirteenfold in recent years. The drug is not 13 times better. It is
the same insulin that has been around for decades. But the reason the
pharmaceutical companies do it is because they can get away with it.
This morning, I am going to take a few minutes and talk about what
this really means for patients because I can tell you, this fall, there
are a lot of families across this country who would rather be prepping
for holidays than worrying about their healthcare. Unfortunately, the
Trump administration is refusing to provide that kind of security for
our patients.
To begin, let me tell you about a youngster in Oregon named Jasper.
Jasper is 3, full of energy and love, and a big fan of playtime with
cars and trucks and trains. He was born, however, with huge medical
challenges--cystic fibrosis, cardiac and pancreatic problems, hearing
loss. He needs a variety of treatments multiple times a day. It is so
hard on Jasper's family. It is so hard on Jasper. And, of course, the
costs of Jasper's care are in the stratosphere. The family is fortunate
to have health insurance through a parent's employer. They know how
absolutely vital it is to have what they consider to be a lifeline--the
protection of the Affordable Care Act.
At the heart of the Affordable Care Act are bedrock, ironclad
protections for people like them--no discrimination by insurance
companies against preexisting conditions. That was something we used to
have some support for from the other side of the aisle. I know about
that because I wrote a bipartisan bill that had airtight, loophole-free
protection against what essentially was discrimination against those
with preexisting conditions, and we got it into the Affordable Care
Act.
Yet now we see the other side of the aisle trying to unravel those
protections. They are trying to unravel the protection that we see for
patients with respect to big expenses. Our approach has no annual or
lifetime limits on coverage, no coverage denials that dragged people
into bureaucratic nightmares, has young people covered on their
parents' plan until age 26, and lots more. Those protections saved
people's lives and made healthcare affordable for millions of
Americans.
Unfortunately, with the support of my colleagues here on the other
side in the Senate, the Trump administration wants to eliminate those
protections that are so important to Jasper and families like his. My
colleagues on the other side are standing by and basically doing
nothing while the administration and Republican-led States are out
there maneuvering in the courts to get the entire Affordable Care Act
wiped out.
The so-called Texas case, which is an absurd lawsuit based on an
absurd argument--an argument that wouldn't pass the smell test in a
middle class school mock trial--somehow rightwing, ideological judges
have kept it alive. Because this lawsuit keeps hanging around, tens of
millions of Americans might lose their healthcare with hardly any
warning and no fallback options to protect them.
Now Republicans have claimed they have fix-it bills they could pass
in the event their allies took down the Affordable Care Act. They do
read like they were written by the lawyers and the lobbyists on the
payroll of the big insurance companies. If insurance companies can hike
up the cost of treating a preexisting condition so high that it becomes
unaffordable, it is no different from being denied coverage at the
outset.
While the Texas case moves forward, the Trump administration is
continuing to allow junk insurance scam artists to defraud Americans
into buying worthless plans that aren't worth really the paper they are
written on and certainly don't cover the healthcare Americans need.
I want to be very specific about it. This is an insurance lobbyist's
dream.
[[Page S6689]]
You have tax breaks for junk insurance. That is on every insurance
lobbyist's wish list for the holidays. I think it is federally funded
fraud, plain and simple, but unfortunately it has the support of a lot
of Republicans here in the Congress.
It is now the middle of the open enrollment period for health
insurance on healthcare.gov. The Trump administration's support for
junk plans has created a whole new burden for families across the
country who are shopping for insurance.
I am particularly troubled by this because I remember what junk
insurance used to be like. I was director of the senior citizens at
home for almost 7 years before I was elected to the Congress, and those
were the days when you could go around the country, whether it was
Montana or Oregon or anywhere else, and fast-talking salesmen would
sell 10, 15, sometimes 20 policies to supplement a senior's Medicare.
They were called Medigap policies, and they were useless. Seniors
should have saved that money to pay the rent and maybe make sure they
had heat in their houses.
Finally, we got rid of those Medigap rip-off policies. When I came to
the Congress, it was my top priority. We got it passed. It was a
bipartisan proposal. But now junk plans are back. They are different
from those Medigap rip-offs, but, much like what I battled when I was
the head of the senior citizens in Oregon, they are still built around
the same proposition. They are essentially worthless. They are an
insurance lobbyist's dream. In the case of what we are dealing with--
the administration gutting the Affordable Care Act--I think it is
essentially Federal tax breaks for junk insurance, and that is why I
think it is tantamount to federally funded fraud.
The Trump administration's support for junk plans has created a whole
new burden for families across the country who are trying to shop for
insurance that gives them real value. Those shoppers used to be able to
trust that junk plans had actually been banned from the marketplace.
Now those shoppers have to wade through Byzantine and manipulative
marketing scams and incomprehensible insurance lingo to try to figure
out if they are getting coverage that actually helps them or, as I have
described too often, just worthless junk.
What is worse, the Trump administration actually redirects people
looking for coverage from the healthcare.gov website to third-party
brokers who can sell unsuspecting customers junk plans. I think it is
astounding that the Trump administration has seen fit to heap another
burden on vulnerable people. After we have called this administration
out on it, they are not willing to do anything to correct it.
But unfortunately, since the beginning of the Trump administration--
with the help of too many allies in the Congress--it has been one
attempt after another to take healthcare away from vulnerable
Americans, from millions of vulnerable Americans, those like 3-year-old
little Jasper and his family, that I started talking about at home in
Oregon.
On a fundamental level, this is a debate about whether this country
is going to go back to the days when healthcare was only for the
healthy and wealthy. That was the way it worked, if the insurance
companies could clobber somebody with a preexisting condition. If you
are healthy, it didn't matter. You did not have to worry. If you were
wealthy, you just sat down and wrote out a check. That is the way it
worked.
But when I came to the Senate, we put together a bipartisan bill,
airtight, loophole-free protection for those with preexisting
conditions. There are colleagues on the other side of the aisle who
cosponsored my bill--and by the way, the President of the Senate knows
who was the leader of that effort, one of his predecessors in the Utah
delegation, the late Senator Bennet.
So this idea that we are just going to sit around and go back to the
days when healthcare was for the healthy and wealthy, that is not
acceptable to Finance Democrats that I have the honor to work with. It
is not acceptable to any of us on this side, and it should not be
acceptable to my colleagues in the Congress.
That is where Donald Trump wants to return to, the days when
healthcare was for the healthy and wealthy. They have made it clear by
working to eliminate preexisting condition protections in the Congress
and the courts, by giving insurance lobbyists Federal tax breaks for
junk insurance plans, and by seeking to slash health programs for the
vulnerable.
I just want to make it clear that, on this side of the aisle, we are
about patients. We are about protecting patients. We are about the
proposition that in a country as strong and good and rich as ours--
where we are going to spend $3.5 trillion this year on healthcare, if
you divide the number of Americans, like maybe 325 million into $3.5
trillion, you could send every family of four in America a check for
$40,000. We are spending enough to take care of patients.
We ought to be doing more to protect, rather than turning back the
clock on young people like Jasper and his family. I just wanted to make
it clear, we will be on the floor talking about more patients in the
days ahead and on the fight, a fight we are going to prosecute
relentlessly, to protect those patients under the Affordable Care Act.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Romney). The Senator from Ohio.
Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I was walking by and heard Senator Wyden--I
do not usually sit over here--Senator Wyden was speaking about
healthcare. It is just so clear to me some of the things that this body
could be doing to bring down the cost of healthcare and to expand the
number of people that have health insurance. I know, in my State, I
worked with, I know, a friend of the Presiding Officer, Governor
Kasich, a Republican--I am a Democrat--on expanding Medicaid in Ohio.
In fact, after the Affordable Care Act, we now have 900,000 more people
that have insurance.
But what I liked about what Senator Wyden was saying was some of the
things we could do in the future. It is clear to me, if we allowed the
government to negotiate drug prices on behalf of Medicare
beneficiaries, directly with the drug companies the way we do at the
Veterans Administration, it could make a huge difference in drug costs.
We, in this body, a large part is because the drug company lobby
refuses to do it.
Mr. WYDEN. If my colleague would yield?
Mr. BROWN. Yes.
MR. WYDEN. My colleague has been an enormous champion for consumers,
and I just want to ask my colleague, didn't he and finance Democrats
try in the Finance Committee to get rid of the restrictions on
negotiating to do exactly what he is saying?
Mr. BROWN. Yes, that is exactly right. It should be an easy process.
We know how to do it at the Veterans Administration. The cost is 40 or
50 percent of what typically is the cost a patient pays.
The other thing we could do--and we were this close to getting it in
the Affordable Care Act, is giving people the option, at age 50 or 55,
to buy into Medicare because, as Senator Wyden knows, we all have in
our States--whether it is Utah or Oregon or Ohio, we have 58-year-olds
that lose their jobs or 62-year-olds that lose their jobs, and they
cannot really often find insurance, or it is not affordable if they
can. If they had the option to buy in--rather in a neutral way we built
it into the Affordable Care Act, but lost in the end. We fell one vote
short. But it would have made a huge difference in people being able to
get through that.
I will never forget, I had a townhall in Youngstown some years ago. A
woman stood up and said, ``I'm 62 years old. I hold two jobs. I never
had health insurance. I just want to stay alive until I'm 65.'' She did
not say I want to stay alive to raise my grandkids or to take a trip.
It was to stay alive so I can get on Medicare and get insurance, and
that just should not be in this country.
Mr. WYDEN. My understanding--and, again, I have listened to my
colleague on the Finance Committee. He is a champion on not going back,
but going forward with more Medicare-type choices. Like making that
person who is really wondering if they are going to make it until 65 in
order to get to Medicare, he would like--for example, say an older
woman who has been a victim of age discrimination, did not have much
money, he would like to
[[Page S6690]]
make them eligible for Medicare at 60 or 61 or something like that.
Mr. BROWN. Absolutely--I thank Senator Wyden--absolutely. Just give
them that option. It is something we ought to be able to do. We can do
it in a cost-effective way. In the end, it means fewer trips to the
emergency room. In the end, it means a healthy population of people at
those 10 years when they are more likely to get sick and more likely to
need Medicare, but are not likely to be eligible.
I thank Senator Wyden.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Colorado.