[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 12]
[House]
[Page 16970]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT

  (Mr. YARMUTH asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute.)
  Mr. YARMUTH. Mr. Speaker, opponents of the Affordable Care Act in 
Congress have spent the past few weeks reveling in the problems of the 
Federal exchange Web site, healthcare.gov.
  In my State of Kentucky, where we have created our own exchange, we 
have had tremendous success. As of last week, nearly 415,000 people had 
explored the Web site and assessed their options. More than 42,000 are 
now enrolled in health plans, many of them for the first time; and 843 
small businesses have begun applying for coverage for their employees, 
with 309 of them already able to offer coverage to their workers.
  We are 6 weeks into a 6-month open enrollment period, and while the 
failures of the Federal health care Web site are frustrating, they are 
far from fatal. The true danger to the more than 42,000 Kentuckians who 
have gained coverage under the law--and the hundreds of thousands more 
who will--is what opponents of the law are proposing in its place: a 
return to the broken system that failed tens of millions of Americans 
each year.
  Mr. Speaker, I encourage my colleagues and the American people to 
keep a healthy perspective. We did not enact the Affordable Care Act to 
launch a Web site. We did it to ensure that every American has access 
to affordable, quality care, and we should all work together to 
accomplish that goal.

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