[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 161 (Wednesday, October 1, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6897-S6898]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           Government Funding

  Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, preventing people from losing their

[[Page S6898]]

healthcare should not be a partisan issue because outside of the four 
corners of this Capitol, it should not matter if you are a Democrat or 
a Republican or an Independent--we should all not want people to have 
spikes in their health insurance costs.
  In a matter of days, tens of millions of people all across the 
country are going to get letters in the mail, saying: Your monthly 
premium, starting January 1, is going to be more than double what you 
pay now--more than double.
  That is not my speculating. That is not my allegation. That is not a 
political talking point that was cooked up in some Democratic lab. That 
is what the Kaiser Family Foundation analysis shows, that premiums will 
increase on average by 114 percent per person--not 14 percent; 114 
percent.
  That is just the average. Some people's rates will be changed based 
on their income level. Say you make $35,000 a year. You are now going 
to be paying almost $1,600 more per year for coverage. And if you are a 
family of four making 75 grand, you are going to be paying more than 
3,000 extra dollars.
  I just encourage everybody who is watching--all of my colleagues, all 
of the staff, all of the members of the media--to talk to anyone in 
your hometown. Most people just don't have that kind of money lying 
around. If you are a family living paycheck to paycheck, if you are a 
young couple saving up to buy a home, if you are a small business owner 
already cutting back on costs because everything is more expensive now, 
what are you supposed to do?
  This is not a crisis the Democrats have cooked up to score political 
points. The reason for the urgency is that October 1 is the day that 
people are going to get letters from their insurance carriers telling 
them that this is happening. Open enrollment begins in exactly a month.
  People are scared about how they are going to pay for their 
healthcare or if they are going to have it at all. There are a lot of 
people who just can't absorb this extra cost. It is not like you can 
buy a little less of something. When you are at the grocery store--for 
instance, vegetables are now 39 percent more expensive. Well, you still 
have some money in your pocket. You are going to buy fewer vegetables 
and more of the cheap stuff, which is why, by the way, Hamburger Helper 
purchases have spiked.
  So people are making these adjustments to the fact that everything 
has gotten more expensive, but with health insurance, you can't turn 
the dial like that. You can't buy a little less health insurance. You 
either can absorb the cost or you cannot, and if you cannot, you will 
go without health insurance.
  Here is the thing that people need to understand: This directly 
impacts about 24 million people, OK? That is enough for us to, like, 
pay enough attention and try to come up with a bipartisan solution. But 
the truth is that we already know what happens when people lose their 
health insurance, right? They end up getting sicker and sicker, and at 
some point, they present themselves to emergency rooms.
  Everybody understands--kind of intuitively, but there is plenty of 
data to back this up--that when you present yourself at an emergency 
room when you are already supersick, you require a bunch of very 
expensive interventions, and that cost is distributed among the rest of 
us who still have insurance.
  So it is not just the 24 million Americans who are going to pay more 
for health insurance and some number of millions of those Americans who 
are just not going to have insurance at all, it is also a mathematical 
certainty that the increased stupidity of the system, the increased 
extent to which the system now makes even less sense than it does 
already--we are all going to eat the cost, whether you are on the so-
called exchange or not.
  Look, Republicans are in charge of Washington. We lost the election. 
Elections--consequences. I get it. When we had the trifecta, we did a 
bunch of things to reduce the price of prescription medicine, to build 
infrastructure, to fix the post office, to do the Respect for Marriage 
Act, to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. We did a bunch of stuff, and 
Republicans are doing a bunch of stuff, but we are trying to hand our 
Republican colleagues a lifeline because prices are going to spike 
everywhere.
  I said this yesterday, and I mean this: If we were a little more 
cynical, we might just say ``This is your problem; why don't you guys 
just stew in it?'' because this is, frankly, electorally, a very 
powerful issue. People are going to be really pissed when they get 
these letters in the mail. They really are. So the supercynical, 
election-oriented thing for us to do would be simply to say ``Good luck 
with all that.''
  But maybe it is the strength of the Democratic caucus, maybe it is 
the weakness of the Democratic caucus, but we just care too much about 
people to let that happen. So we are simply asking, in the context of 
this shutdown, to jump-start a negotiation about how to prevent a 114-
percent increase in the cost of healthcare for 24 million Americans.
  Look, the cost of electricity is not just up; it is double the 
inflation rate. The cost of groceries is spiking. The cost of raw 
materials to build a house--spiking. The cost of basically anything you 
want to buy at a Walmart or a Costco or a Target or a Safeway or a Food 
Lion or wherever you go is spiking. All of that is a consequence of 
both inflation and tariffs. But this thing is a public policy. This is 
intentional to spike these rates.
  We are saying: Are you guys sure you want to do this?
  We are about to find out whether they are sure that they want to 
impose a doubling of insurance costs on 24 million Americans.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Michigan.