[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 1]
[House]
[Pages 383-384]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             TUCKER WRIGHT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Amash). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Braley) is 
recognized for 23 minutes.
  Mr. BRALEY of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, one of the things that we've heard a 
lot today is talk about policy, but I want to spend some time tonight 
talking about the face of the efforts to repeal the Affordable Care 
Act. And the face could not be any clearer than this young man to my 
right.
  This is Tucker Wright, a 4-year-old boy who lives in Malcom, Iowa, 
and January 2 of this year was an important day for Tucker and his 
family because 2 years ago this young boy was diagnosed with liver 
cancer before he reached his second birthday. And some amazing doctors 
and nurses took care of him after they removed two-thirds of his liver, 
and, miraculously, he is alive today.
  And his parents had done everything they were supposed to do. They 
both had full-time jobs. They had the best health care coverage you 
could get in the State of Iowa at that time. Yet in spite of that, they 
ended up with tens of thousands of dollars of uninsured medical 
expenses. And this young boy faces an uncertain future filled with CT 
scans, tests, medical procedures over his lifetime--and he is just 
getting started in his life.
  Now, before January 1 of this year, his father and mother couldn't 
change their jobs because if they had, their coverage would have been 
denied because of a preexisting condition--his liver cancer. But 
because of the Affordable Care Act passed in this Congress and signed 
into law by President Obama last year, as of January 2 his parents no 
longer were bound to their jobs, because they had the freedom to get a 
different job and not worry about having his health care benefits 
excluded under a policy called preexisting conditions.
  Now, what our friends on the other side of the aisle don't want you 
to know about Tucker is that if they get what they want and they repeal 
this health care bill, the very first thing that's going to happen is 
his insurance company is going to send his parents a notice of 
rescission--that his coverage is terminated because he has a 
preexisting condition that would then be subject to excluding his 
coverage.
  Now, they could do that because we banned the practice of preexisting 
conditions, and we banned the practice of rescission in the Affordable 
Care Act after hearing days of testimony from witnesses who had 
experienced those practices firsthand and talked about the devastating 
impact it had on their lives.
  So when we're on the floor tomorrow talking about repealing the 
Affordable Care Act, I want you to think about Tucker Wright and what 
that means to him and the millions of other American children who would 
be discriminated against by insurance companies because of a disease 
they have no control over.
  And our friends on the other side of the aisle are telling us, Don't 
worry, we're going to repeal this bill and then we're going to come 
back and we're going to fix these problems. Really.
  You know, I came here in 2006, Mr. Speaker; and I was proud to be 
part of that class of 2006. But when I got here, the Republicans had 
been in power for 6 years. They had George Bush in the White House, 
they had a majority in the House and a majority in the Senate. And what 
did they do during that period to ban the practice of preexisting 
conditions? What did they do to ban the practice of rescissions? 
Nothing. Not one thing. Despite multiple health care bills that were 
presented in that 6-year period, none of the concerns they're talking 
about being committed to fixing now were addressed by them.
  You hear a lot of talk about this unfair, unconstitutional burden of 
an employer mandate. Well, folks, if you go back to 1993, you will see 
that Republicans--including my Republican Senator from Iowa, Chuck 
Grassley--offered legislation in Congress to have an individual mandate 
because they knew the only way we were going to get costs under control 
was by bringing more people into insured plans, spreading the risk, and 
making health care more affordable for all Americans.

                              {time}  2120

  So why do we find ourselves where we are now? Well, we find ourselves 
here because of an unwillingness to face the reality that Democrats in 
the House, and the Senate, and President Obama faced a problem that had 
been plaguing this Nation for decades: millions upon millions of 
Americans without access to quality, affordable health care. And that 
was a stain on our national reputation. And we decided to do something 
about it. And we didn't make any bones about the fact that this was 
going to be a priority.
  Some of my colleagues and I ran on this issue in 2006 because of the 
problem of 47 million Americans without

[[Page 384]]

access to health care coverage. We hear complaints about the burdens on 
small businesses. I was a small business owner in Iowa for 20 years. 
And at the end of my career, every year we would fill out five to seven 
applications for every one of our employees, trying to find insurance 
coverage that was affordable that would take care of their medical 
needs. Small businesses were being priced out of the insurance market, 
and nothing was being done about it. That's why I'm proud of the fact 
that Democrats took this challenge head on.
  We were serious about the problem. We listened to days and days of 
testimony from people all across the health care spectrum, all across 
the health care economic spectrum. We held days of bipartisan markups 
to give people on both sides of the aisle the opportunity to offer 
amendments and improve this bill. And contrary to what you're hearing, 
we accepted amendments from our Republican colleagues. They were 
included in the bill. They made it a better bill when we brought it to 
the floor and voted on it. And yet now it's like we want to go back and 
eliminate everything good that happened during that period of time.
  It's like the movie ``Men in Black,'' where they had that little pen-
like device that they would hold in front of your head, and once it 
flashed you would forget everything you had just heard. Well, we cannot 
afford to let that happen. Too many people's lives, like Tucker 
Wright's life, are depending on what we do here. And that's why when we 
talk about these important issues, remember the faces of the people 
whose lives are benefiting from this important legislation.
  One of the things that we don't hear much talk about is the enormous 
positive impact this bill has on the lives of young people. One other 
thing that has changed dramatically from when I graduated from college 
many years ago is that now many young college graduates are required to 
perform an unpaid internship in order to get a job. It may be an entry-
level requirement before they can take a certification test, or it may 
be the only way for them to get access to that employment market. Well, 
what does that mean practically? It means that once those students 
graduate from college, if they're older than 22 they get kicked off 
their parents' insurance policies.
  Okay. Well, in the past, people would go out and find work, and 
usually that work had insurance coverage with it. Not any more. We have 
generations of young people out there looking for work with no health 
insurance. And when they get sick and need medical care, if they don't 
have insurance, they still get the care; but somebody pays for it. And 
that somebody is us, the U.S. taxpayers and people who buy private 
insurance, who have their premiums increased or their taxes increased 
to take care of people who don't have health insurance.
  So this bill does amazing things for young people. It prohibits 
discrimination of people like Tucker Wright. And it allows seniors 
access to care so that they know they're getting the wellness and 
preventive check-ups they need to make sure that they are getting the 
best care that they can.
  There's a lot of talk on the floor in support of repealing this bill, 
about the imposition that this bill has on health care providers and 
the barriers it erects between them and their patients. And nothing 
could be further from the truth. In fact, what this bill does is 
promotes an atmosphere between physicians, health care providers, and 
patients that strengthens that bond, that relationship, that dependency 
by giving patients more access to their doctor and their health care 
providers at the time they need it most, when they are making decisions 
about chronic care, which is one of the biggest cost-drivers in health 
care today, managing their diseases, and in lowering the cost of health 
care for all of us. And yet you won't hear one word about that as a 
critical benefit of this bill.
  And that's why, as the American people, Mr. Speaker, listen to the 
debate tomorrow leading up to this important vote, they need to ask 
themselves what's this all about, and whose lives really are going to 
be impacted if we repeal health care. It's time to talk reality. It's 
time to talk about the Tucker Wrights of this world and what this will 
do to them, because rather than seeing this as a Patients' Bill of 
Rights that finally preserves protection between patients and their 
insurance companies, we are talking about going back to the bad old 
days when those protections didn't exist, when patients were playing 
against a stacked deck and were often cut out of the decision-making 
process.
  The risk is too great. We need to think of who is going to benefit 
from this bill and who will be harmed if it is repealed. And I call 
upon all of my colleagues to search in their hearts and their souls for 
the real impact that this bill is going to have if repealed.
  And with that, I yield back the balance of my time.

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