[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 9]
[Senate]
[Pages 13610-13612]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          AFFORDABLE CARE ACT

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, we have to return to the business at hand. 
Since the moment President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, making 
it the

[[Page 13611]]

law of the land and ensuring every American has access to quality 
health insurance at a price they can afford, Republicans have been on 
an absurd quest to undo this progress.
  Republican Members of Congress were horrified when the U.S. Supreme 
Court said the law we call ``ObamaCare''--the Affordable Care Act--is 
constitutional. That is what the Supreme Court said. In spite of this 
being the law of the land--and it is the law of the land--House 
Republicans alone have voted more than 40 times to repeal ObamaCare and 
are now threatening to shut down the entire government unless this 
Congress denies funding to implement this very constitutional law.
  Under ObamaCare, Members of Congress and their staffs will be covered 
by exactly the same plans that will extend health insurance to millions 
of Americans next year. Five hundred thirty-five Members of Congress 
and 16,000 staff members are treated the same as other employees across 
America under the law. They are treated that way under ObamaCare, and 
rightfully so. Just as 150 million other Americans who get their health 
insurance through their jobs; that is, their employer, the Federal 
Government will share a part of the cost of that health care for us, 
for the 16,000 who work in the Capitol complex--as it has for all 
Federal employees for many decades. These are the people in Carson 
City, NV, Reno, NV, and Las Vegas, NV, who answer the phones and help 
people with problems involving Social Security, veterans' benefits, 
whether they can be buried at the beautiful cemetery we have in Fernley 
for veterans or the one in Boulder City where every day we bury lots 
and lots of people who are veterans.
  These are the sorts of inquiries we get around the State of Nevada, 
and people work long hard hours to respond to those requests. They are 
dedicated public servants. That is to whom the junior Senator from 
Louisiana said, No thanks; they are not entitled to anything as far as 
being treated as everybody else is treated.
  Even more directly to the point, Members of Congress and our staffs 
will live by the same rules and get their health care from the same 
exchanges as other Americans. But the junior Senator from Louisiana, I 
repeat, and a number of other misguided Republicans want to force 
Members of Congress and their staffs to live by a different set of 
rules. Although Senator Vitter has happily allowed the Federal 
Government to pay for a portion of his health insurance for many years 
as a Member of the House of Representatives and as a Member of the 
Senate, now he wants these 16,000 congressional workers to cover the 
full cost of health insurance.
  With this background, one must ask: If Senator Vitter opposes the 
employer contribution for congressional staffers, does he oppose it 
also for the 150 million other Americans whose employers help pay their 
health insurance premiums? Does he want to discourage private employers 
from doing the right thing and providing their employees with 
affordable health insurance coverage? Is it what he wants, to do away 
with the insurance 150 million Americans have in America? Millions, I 
repeat, millions and millions of employers rely on this important 
benefit to attract the best and brightest and hardest working people 
they can find. Ending the employer contribution would effectively slap 
150 million Americans with a big pay cut. Is that Senator Vitter's 
intention?
  If Republican Senators believe they should bear the full cost of 
their own health insurance, they can, without any change in the law, 
decline Federal Government support in contributions and pay their own 
way. They can even encourage their own staffs to do so. Why they would 
want to do that, I don't understand, but they could do it. But for 
Senator Vitter and his Republican allies to end the contribution for 
16,000 hard-working Federal employees--even after years of accepting 
the subsidy themselves--is hypocritical and mean-spirited.
  In truth, this is only the latest Republican aim to derail the 
successful implementation of ObamaCare. Last November there was a big 
poll taken--it is called an election--where Americans overwhelmingly 
voted to reelect President Obama and to keep ObamaCare as the law of 
the land. That was the issue of the campaign. Who won that? The 
American people won, and President Obama won. As for ObamaCare--the 
constitutional law of the land--the American people said, Let's go 
ahead and do it. Americans have spoken very loudly and very clearly. It 
is time to move on to something else. It is the law and has been.
  On October 1, about 25 million Americans who have no health insurance 
will--for the first time, most of them in their entire lifetime--be 
able to get insurance. What we have found in New York alone is that the 
insurance is going to save 50 percent of what it did before--it is 50 
percent cheaper. In Nevada it is cheaper. It is the way it is all over 
the country.
  According to the voters and according to the Supreme Court of the 
United States of America, ObamaCare is the law of the land. It is time 
for Republicans to mature--I guess you could say it a different way: to 
grow up--and recognize this is the law in America and has been for 
years. It is time for Republicans to stop denying reality.
  The Senate should be passing other legislation. We should be passing 
an energy efficiency bill that will save taxpayers money, creating 
good-paying jobs--we need that--rebuilding roads and bridges. I have 
said here before 70,000 bridges are in a state of disrepair. Yesterday 
a report came out that 8,000 of them are near collapse--8,000. We are 
not spending money to take care of that problem. Our highways, our 
roads, our dams need money. This is not money that goes to the Federal 
Government so you can have a truck that says: Federal Government 
building a road or fixing a dam. The money goes to the private sector. 
That is what we should be doing. For every $1 billion we spend doing 
something about the highways, bridges, roads, dams, water systems, 
sewer systems, we create 47,500 high-paying jobs, and thousands of 
other jobs spin off from that. That is what we should be doing.
  We should be facing the reality of climate change. Look what happened 
in Colorado. I talked to Senator Bennet yesterday. He said the floods 
were Biblical. In one part of Colorado, it rained 12 inches in 2 hours. 
I cannot imagine that. Fires all over the West. Climate change is here. 
I met with the Foreign Minister of Bangladesh. They do not know what 
they are going to do with the rise of the sea which is taking place. In 
that country there is no high ground. It is that way all over the 
world. The Marshall Islands--a thousand islands make up the Marshall 
Islands--55,000 people live there. These islands are being washed away 
with the new waves they have never seen before.
  Climate change is here. We are doing nothing about it. They are 
spending all of our time, the American taxpayers' time, trying to 
repeal a law that has been in effect for 4 years.
  We should be doing something about immigration reform. They talk 
about wanting to do something for the economy. Try passing immigration 
reform. It creates to the positive $1 trillion. It would reduce our 
debt by $1 trillion. Let's do that. Let's fix our broken tax system.
  We should be doing those things, not relitigating 4-year-old policy 
battles. But instead of working with Democrats to effectively implement 
ObamaCare or to pass new laws that benefit middle-class families, 
Republicans are obsessed with fighting a real old battle, and they are 
doing it at taxpayer expense.
  Instead of standing with millions of Americans who are already 
benefiting from ObamaCare, Republicans are standing with insurance 
companies that would return us to a time when profits came before 
people. That is the way it works.
  Since President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, 
insurance companies can no longer discriminate against children with 
preexisting conditions. That is a good deal. If you have a child with 
diabetes, that boy or girl cannot be denied insurance. If they have 
epilepsy, they cannot be denied insurance. And in a short few months

[[Page 13612]]

all Americans will no longer be able to be denied insurance coverage 
because of a preexisting illness. They can no longer raise your rates 
for no reason. They can no longer drop your coverage if you get sick. 
That is the law today.
  Today children can no longer be denied insurance, as I have 
indicated, because they are born with a disease or a disability. And 
that, I repeat, will soon be extended to all Americans no matter their 
age. And listen to this one: Very soon being a woman will no longer be 
considered a preexisting condition, as it was before ObamaCare passed.
  In my relatively sparsely populated State of Nevada, tens of 
thousands of seniors have saved tens of millions of dollars on 
medicines because the Affordable Care Act has helped close the gap on 
prescription drug coverage.
  More than 3 million young people, including 33,000 young Nevadans, 
have been able to stay on their parents' health policies until they are 
26 years old--3 million. Hundreds of thousands of businesses that 
already offer their employees health insurance are getting tax credits 
for doing the right thing.
  In a few months almost 130 million Americans with preexisting 
conditions--and what are some of these preexisting conditions; I talked 
about it generally a minute ago: high blood pressure, all kinds of 
things that happen as you get older--will have access to reasonably 
priced coverage, no matter their high blood pressure or their heart 
condition or whatever the situation might be. And 25 million Americans 
who cannot afford health insurance today will be offered health 
insurance through the exchanges.
  Republicans have been trying for years to erase these gains and force 
millions of American families once again to rely on the most expensive 
care in America today, which is where? It is emergency rooms. Hospitals 
hate it because their bad debt goes up, and all it does is drive up the 
cost of insurance. The care is not as good as it would be if they could 
go when they first get sick. They go there out of desperation, and that 
is what I assume the Republicans want everyone to do. Everyone can go 
to an emergency room, but it is so expensive and does not do the trick.
  So punishing hard-working congressional staff, who put in long hours 
because they believe in public service--that is, the work we do here in 
Congress--will not roll back the benefits of ObamaCare. Punishing 
congressional staffers will not prevent millions of Americans from 
gaining the health insurance they need and deserve next year. But it 
will hurt thousands of men and women, including Senator Vitter's 
colleagues and his own staff.
  Instead of willfully denying that ObamaCare is the law or purposely 
trying to derail its implementation, it is time for Senator Vitter to 
help us improve the law of the land and ensure every American has 
access to the kind of care Members of Congress enjoy already, as do 150 
million other Americans who get health care through their employers.

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