[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Page 16692]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                               OBAMACARE

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I wish to say a word about ObamaCare as 
well.
  I wish to remind my colleagues that the President is absolutely 
correct. He is correct when he says ObamaCare is about so much more 
than some flawed Web site. It is about people. People such as the 
California woman with stage 4 gallbladder cancer whose story we read 
about in the Wall Street Journal just this past weekend. I will read 
some of what she wrote:

       I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this 
     luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical 
     insurance policy has been canceled effective December 31.

  Here are the impossible choices she says she is left with. She can 
either get coverage through the exchange and lose access to her cancer 
doctors or she can pay up to 50 percent more for, as she put it, ``the 
privilege of starting over with an unfamiliar insurance company and 
impaired benefits.''
  That is just not right. It is not what the President promised, and it 
is not the kind of health care reform Americans asked for.
  So we should keep our focus where it belongs--on the real people 
getting hurt by this law.
  But that doesn't mean we should stop asking questions about 
healthcare.gov too. Because if the government can't even run a Web site 
that it had 3 years--3 years--and hundreds of millions of dollars to 
create, can Americans entrust the same bureaucracy with even more power 
over their health care?
  The calamitous rollout reminds us that we do not even know if data 
being submitted over this Web site is 100 percent secure. In today's 
age of digital scammers, that is a real concern for our constituents. 
Identity theft is about the last problem Americans need to be dealing 
with right now, especially with everything else this economy and this 
law have been throwing right at them. They are already mad enough about 
the President's repeated, unequivocal claims of, ``If you like it, you 
can keep it.''
  The White House keeps trying to message its way out of this whopper, 
but no matter what they say, the reality remains: People are getting 
hurt. People are getting hit with premiums they can't afford and 
millions are losing the coverage they like. In my home State of 
Kentucky alone, 130,000 individual policies and 150,000 small group 
policies will be canceled. Remember, the President assured Americans up 
and down this wasn't going to happen.
  I read about one DC woman who just lost her plan. She found something 
comparable on the exchange, but it cost a lot more than what she had 
before. Here is what she said: ``[It's] just not fair. [It's] 
ridiculous.''
  She is not alone.
  So I will say again it is time for Washington Democrats to work with 
Republicans to start working for their constituents instead of thinking 
that their first priority is to protect the President and his namesake 
legislation.

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