[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 11]
[House]
[Page 15880]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




              DEFICIT SPENDING AND THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
Tennessee (Mrs. Blackburn) for 5 minutes.
  Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized for the 
time, and I appreciate the recognition that this Chamber and my 
colleagues are putting on the issues before us.
  As we look at Federal spending, what we have to do is say: What is 
causing us to be in a position where we are borrowing $2 billion a day? 
And if we are borrowing $2 billion a day, we have to ask: Is that a 
sustainable practice and something that we as a Nation can continue? Of 
course the answer to that is, no, it is not sustainable. Therefore, we 
have to look at what is causing us to spend more money than we are 
taking in, and one of the things that is at the top of that list that 
is too expensive to afford is the ObamaCare program, the Affordable 
Care Act.
  What I would like to do today is focus my comments on what we are 
seeing from the Affordable Care Act and what has happened with the cost 
of this program and why it has become too expensive to afford and why 
we have to talk about it and focus on it and put it on the table as we 
talk about what our Nation spends.
  Now, we all remember supposedly ObamaCare, the Affordable Care Act, 
was going to be a $900 billion program, roughly, that was to give 
access to affordable health insurance for those who didn't have access 
to health insurance, but let's look at what has happened.
  This was the estimate: under a trillion dollars, $900 billion, when 
the program was passed. But, oh, remember, we had to pass it in order 
to read it to find out what was in it. After we read it the first time, 
$1.4 trillion. My source on this is the Congressional Budget Office, 
the CBO. Every time it has been reviewed, with some of the nearly 
13,000 pages of rules and regulations, guess what has happened? The 
cost estimate has gone up. Now ObamaCare is a $2.6 trillion program. So 
what we are looking at is a near tripling in cost before the program 
goes into effect. This is why we continue to say, as we look at fiscal 
health, fiscal restraint, you have to look at what is happening with 
the cost projections on ObamaCare.
  Now, for those of us from my State of Tennessee, this is something 
that is not new to us. We had the test case for HillaryCare in our 
State. It is called TennCare. What happened with the TennCare program 
was it ended up quadrupling in cost in a period of 5 years.
  Now, this causes us a little bit of concern because we look at what 
has happened with the cost of government-managed and -delivered health 
care services. Well, let's take a look at Medicare and where it was 
supposed to be in 1968 and then what has happened with its costs. You 
can look at these lines, the red line.
  These are on my Web site for our colleagues that would like to go and 
look at the Web site.
  You can see what happened in 1968, and the red line shows where it 
has grown to today. For something that was to end up being about $12 
billion a year, we are now spending over $400 billion a year on. You 
can see what were to be the projections here on this bottom line, and 
you see how far it has exceeded its projections. So because of this, we 
are quite concerned with the growth and the projections of growth for 
ObamaCare.
  Look at the track record of government spending. Do programs 
generally come in below their estimates? No. They generally exceed 
those estimates. So we continue to be very concerned about what will 
happen with the cost of ObamaCare and the impact this is going to have 
on our $3.5-trillion-a-year budget, and we continue to say: We have to 
review this; it is too expensive to afford; and does it fit into what 
the American taxpayer is willing to pay for?
  Because every penny we spend here in Washington, D.C., comes out of 
the taxpayers' pockets from money that they have earned and then have 
paid in taxes, sent to Washington, they expect us to be very careful 
stewards of those dollars.
  Before my time expires, Mr. Speaker, I just want to point out one 
other concern that we have with the exchanges and the way they are 
going to handle information. Six hundred million dollars to build a 
computer system that doesn't work and doesn't protect the identity and 
the information of enrollees in the health care exchange is another of 
the problems there that is worthy of discussion of this program.

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