[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 10943-10944]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          PRETEND LEGISLATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Repeal and replace. If multiple failed attempts 
constitute delivery on a promise, the Republicans have delivered in 
spades.
  Today, the House of Representatives, for the 31st time in this 
session, will take up legislation to repeal all or part of the 
Affordable Care Act, so-called ``ObamaCare.'' There have been 31 
attempts tying up the floor of the House. One's enough. We already did 
it the first or second day we were here. The Senate is not going to 
take it up, but repetition is their mantra here for pretend 
legislation.
  They could take up real legislation. In fact, they had an opportunity 
as part of today's faux repeal to take up my legislation, which passed 
the last House of Representatives with massive bipartisan support, 
which would provide lower health care costs and health insurance costs 
for every American. That was real legislation.
  Why won't we do that? Maybe because it would upset the insurance 
industry, and they're awful generous at campaign time on that side of 
the aisle. Maybe. I don't know why.
  I offered to the Rules Committee an amendment to take away the 
antitrust immunity of the insurance industry.

[[Page 10944]]

Yes, the insurance industry can and does get together behind closed 
doors and collude to drive up your rates, to exclude your coverage, and 
do a whole host of other things. They have been somewhat constrained by 
the Affordable Care Act in some of their collusive practices. Actually, 
the House version of the bill contains repeal of the antitrust 
amendment. The Senate, due to, as I understand it, one Democratic 
Senator, Ben Nelson, failed to include it in their version of the law. 
We had a separate vote later in the House. Over 400 Democrats and 
Republicans voted for it. It's common sense.
  They want to talk about free enterprise. It's not free enterprise 
when an industry can get together and collude to screw consumers. It's 
just not. That's not free enterprise.
  My amendment was not allowed. So we're just going to have another 
fake debate about repealing all of ObamaCare. Let's think about their 
vision here. Remember, it was repeal and replace. Where is the replace 
part? They're not talking about the replace part. That's strange. I 
guess they just want to go back to the way things were--status quo. 
That would be in the 10 years before ObamaCare, the Affordable Care 
Act, health insurance premiums were up 100 percent. That's an average 
of 10 percent a year.

                              {time}  1020

  Let's go back to those good old days. Uninsured, up from 35 to 44 
million, during those same 10 years. Let's go back to those good old 
days.
  Rescissions? Wow, the industry could and did refuse to renew your 
policy or take it away when you got sick, due to technicalities. That 
was called a rescission, a dirty little secret. That was outlawed by 
the Affordable Care Act. They want to bring that back. Give the 
industry the right, when you get sick with cancer, to take away your 
policy even though you have been paying your premium for 20 years at 
these inflated rates.
  Then, denial of coverage, of course, we'll bring back denial of 
coverage--any preexisting condition. Nope, sorry, we won't sell you a 
policy.
  Lifetime limits, they want to bring back all those good old things 
because they have no replacement. They haven't talked about 
replacement. All they're talking about is repeal.
  Let's put just a few statistics on who would not benefit under their 
proposal.
  In my district, 7,400 young Americans under age 26 are on their 
parents' policy. Nationwide, 3.1 million young Americans have insurance 
today who won't have it if their repeal bill goes through.
  Seniors, they are getting a 50 percent discount in the doughnut hole 
that never should have been created. I voted against their doughnut 
hole bill and the bill that subsidized the insurance industry and the 
pharmaceutical industry and didn't do a great job overnight helping out 
seniors with their pharmaceuticals.
  We could have done it for less, straight up, negotiate lower drug 
prices and offer a policy at cost. No, they wouldn't do that because 
the industry didn't like it. A pretty consistent theme here of sucking 
up to the insurance industry.
  Then 148,000 people in my district now get free preventive care under 
their insurance, 54 million people across the country. That goes away 
when their repeal bill goes through with no replacement.
  Children with preexisting conditions; 36,000 in my district have 
coverage now, 17 million nationwide. Tough luck, kids. You're back off 
the policy here under the Republican vision for the future of health 
insurance.
  Lifetime limits; 230,000 people in my district, 105 million people 
nationally. Most people don't know their policies have lifetime limits 
until they get a catastrophic illness and they start to read the fine 
print and the insurance company stops paying the bills and you go 
bankrupt.
  They want to bring back those good old days with repeal of this 
horrible ObamaCare.
  Then we have the business rebates and on and on. This is kind of a 
dyspeptic view of the world here. Let's go back to the dysfunctional 
system we had before.
  Is ObamaCare great? No. Can we fix it? Yes. Should we fix it? Yes. 
Should we adopt measures that would make it better, like taking away 
the antitrust exemption of the health insurance industry? Yes. Will 
they bring those issues up? No. They just want to pretend. It's pretend 
Congress day.

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