[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.