[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 12]
[House]
[Page 17347]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         THE TOLL OF OBAMACARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. McClintock) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, we are now 7 weeks into the 
implementation of ObamaCare. We know that in the first 4 weeks, 106,000 
Americans placed health plans in their shopping baskets, although it is 
not clear how many of them actually purchased plans. Meanwhile, it is 
estimated that 5.5 million Americans have lost the health insurance 
that they had, that they liked, and that they were promised that they 
could keep.
  The inconvenient truth is that this law has dramatically increased 
the ranks of the uninsured. Yesterday came word that college students 
are seeing their low-cost student plans canceled, with replacement 
costs as much as 1,800 percent higher under ObamaCare.
  Although the President recently assured the Nation that the 
cancelations are confined to the individual market, we are now learning 
that his administration gives a mid-range estimate that two-thirds of 
the small employer plans and 45 percent of the large employer plans 
face cancelation as well. Some estimates are as high as 93 million 
Americans who have employer-sponsored plans will lose their plans next 
year.
  And these reports don't account for the millions more who are seeing 
massive rate increases in their current plans; nor do they account for 
the millions more who have had their hours cut back to part time or had 
their wages cut back or have lost their jobs altogether as employers 
struggle to stay in business while bearing these staggering costs; nor 
do they account for those who discover that by accepting ObamaCare 
plans, they are losing their doctors.
  Walmart now warns that the financial impact of this law on families 
could materially depress holiday shopping.
  Mr. Speaker, we are watching nothing less than the wholesale 
destruction and collapse of the American health care system, which, for 
all of its flaws, was still the most advanced, accessible, adaptable, 
and responsive health care system that the world has ever known; and if 
you doubt that for a second, ask yourself where the world's elites came 
when they needed first-class medical care. It wasn't to Canada or 
England or Mexico. It was to the United States. And now we are losing 
that.
  There was nothing unforeseen about this fiasco. Republicans have been 
warning of these outcomes from the very beginning.
  When we warned that Americans would not be able to keep their health 
care plans, we were called extremists. When we warned that ObamaCare 
would result in massive cost increases on consumers, we were called 
alarmists. When we warned that many Americans would lose their jobs, 
have their hours cut back, or see salary cuts, we were called racists. 
When we asked for a 1-year delay in this program to address these 
issues, we were called demagogues, arsonists, and jihadists.
  But, now, all of these warnings are coming to pass, and still the 
Democrats persist in imposing this law on an unwilling Nation. In doing 
so, great violence is being done to our Constitution.
  In implementing this takeover of one-sixth of the American economy, 
the President has repeatedly asserted what can only be described as a 
doctrine of executive nullification--the authority to ignore the parts 
of the law that he finds inconvenient or embarrassing and to pick and 
choose who must obey the law and who need not.
  He has granted some 1,600 exemptions for well-connected interests--
mainly labor unions. He has excused big businesses from the requirement 
that they provide health care to their employees, while forcing 
employees to fend for themselves. He has excused Members of Congress 
and their staffs from paying the full cost of ObamaCare policies.
  And last Thursday, he announced that health insurers can ignore the 
law that requires them to cancel existing policies. Notice that he 
didn't say that he was going to seek to change the law. He said he 
would ignore the law for a year. He invited health insurers to do the 
same, in direct violation of the principle constitutional 
responsibility of the Presidency to ``take care that the laws be 
faithfully executed.''
  Mr. Speaker, I appeal to my Democratic colleagues to consider the 
damage that this law is doing, both to the American health care system 
and to the rule of law itself and, above all, to the families who are 
struggling to deal with its effects.
  I ask them to heed the growing pleas of the American people to have 
their health plans restored to them. I ask them to join Republicans in 
repealing ObamaCare and to help us replace it with the patient-centered 
health care system that we have long proposed: reforms that preserve 
the best of American health care while repairing its flaws.

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