[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9169-9170]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1030
                LET'S ACKNOWLEDGE OBAMACARE DOESN'T WORK

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Kentucky (Mr. Barr) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BARR. Mr. Speaker, recently, some politicians in Washington and 
even back in my home State of Kentucky have held out Kentucky's online 
exchange, or Kentucky Kynect, as a model for how the Affordable Care 
Act, or ObamaCare, can be implemented successfully. They argue that 
ObamaCare is working in Kentucky.
  While it is true that, unlike the
billion dollar malfunctioning healthcare.gov Web site, the Kentucky 
Kynect Web site has appeared to function properly, but that is about 
all that works well.
  ObamaCare is making life harder for most Kentucky families and small 
businesses, driving up premiums and deductibles, taking away choices of 
doctors and hospitals, and forcing people to lose the insurance 
coverage that they liked. The President promised that: if you like your 
health care plan, you will get to keep it.
  But 280,000 of my fellow Kentuckians have lost the health insurance 
that they had, the health insurance that they liked. The government is 
taking away choices. Patients, families, and doctors should be in 
control of their health care, but ObamaCare takes choices away from 
people.
  One insurance broker in Kentucky told me that insurance on the 
Kentucky Kynect exchange, the replacement for all of those canceled 
policies, excludes 90 out of 130 hospitals in Kentucky from its 
network.
  Then there is the cost. Premiums and deductibles are skyrocketing. 
When people are able to get the Web site to work, they are discovering 
that insurance is not affordable.
  As a candidate for President, then-Senator Barack Obama promised to 
sign a health care law that would cut the cost of a typical family's 
premium by up to $2,500 a year, but a quietly released report from the 
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services projects that 11 million 
Americans will face higher premiums because of ObamaCare.
  ObamaCare is an especially bad deal for our seniors. A recent report 
studying the impact of the law's cuts to Medicare Advantage plans 
concluded that premiums could increase for some Kentucky seniors up to 
$1,700 per year.
  Every day, I hear stories from Kentucky families and small businesses 
about how they have been hurt by ObamaCare, about how the government is 
making life harder for them.
  Consider Tony Calvert, a truck driver and member of the Teamsters 
union who lives in my district. He stood up in my townhall meeting in 
Winchester, Kentucky, and told me he suffered from aggressive stage 4 
mantle cell lymphoma and lost his current health insurance.
  The least expensive replacement policy on the Kentucky Kynect 
exchange was $1,800 more per month. ObamaCare was supposed to fix the 
problem of preexisting conditions, but for Tony Calvert and for his 
family, ObamaCare in Kentucky is a personal and financial disaster.
  Consider the Blue Grass Stockyards, a beef cattle auction business 
that employs over 60 full-time employees who have enjoyed the benefits 
of high-quality, employer-provided health insurance for many years.
  In 2010, the company's cost per employee was about $250 each month, 
and it provided about a $1,500 deductible, good prescription coverage, 
and $3,000 out-of-pocket maximum.
  By 2014, this company faced a 50 percent increase in cost because of 
ObamaCare and nowhere near the coverage quality that they had been able 
to provide to their employees in the past.
  Moving all of their employees to Kentucky Kynect was no help. The 
very best scenario they have come up with is to purchase a policy at 
over a 9 percent increase in premiums, a $5,000 in-

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network deductible, and a $10,000 out-of-network deductible, and these 
are narrow networks.
  The company told me that they have always taken pride in providing 
their valued employees with quality coverage, but because of ObamaCare, 
they can't do that any more.
  Then there is Joe and Laura Westbrook. They have been owner-operators 
of Speedflo and Snapflo, a family printing company in Lexington, 
Kentucky, since 1976. Their family-owned business has grown to 32 
employees--including many working moms--providing good benefits and 
affordable group health insurance until May 2014, when their renewal 
rates skyrocketed 101 percent.
  To make matters worse, the available post-ObamaCare plans had 
deductibles that were three times larger than the pre-ObamaCare plans. 
These increases threatened to make it impossible for them to continue 
to provide their employees with health insurance, and for the first 
time, they had to ask their employees to contribute to cover the cost 
of the new plans.
  The VA scandal is a window into the future of ObamaCare. It is a 
window into what government health care looks like: higher cost, higher 
premiums, less choices.
  Let's get together as a country and acknowledge that this law doesn't 
work. It is unfortunate that ObamaCare doesn't work. The American 
people deserve health care reform that actually lowers costs, that 
provides more choices, and does not put bureaucrats in charge of health 
care.

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