[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Page 19308]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                               OBAMACARE

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, ObamaCare is a direct attack on the 
middle class of our country. It is a partisan law that puts ideology 
before people, that hurts many of the very Americans it was supposed to 
help. It resulted in millions of cancellation notices for hard-working 
Americans who had plans they liked and who had done nothing wrong. It 
raised premiums, it raised copays, and it raised deductibles and taxes 
for Americans who were already struggling. It restricted choice and 
access to doctors and hospitals for patients in need.
  We see the pain and the hurt of this law all across the country. We 
see it where we live. In my home State of Kentucky, health costs have 
spiked. ObamaCare first caused tens of thousands of Kentuckians to lose 
the health care plans they were promised they could keep during the 
first year of implementation, then victimized 50,000 more when the 
Commonwealth's much-vaunted ObamaCare co-op completely collapsed. 
ObamaCare has also contributed to Kentucky hospitals being forced to 
cut jobs, reduce wages, and even shut down altogether.
  Some in Washington may have cheered when a Democratic administration 
in Frankfort poured one-quarter of a billion dollars of tax money into 
Kentucky's ObamaCare exchange or when our Democratic Governor 
confidently declared it an ``undisputed fact''--this is what he said: 
an ``undisputed fact''--that ObamaCare's Medicare expansion had added 
12,000 jobs to Kentucky's economy. But like so much of ObamaCare, it 
was just another broken promise. Those jobs numbers were not an 
undisputed fact at all; they were just projections, and they failed to 
ever materialize. Health care jobs have actually declined in Kentucky. 
They did not go up; they declined.
  Today, few of those ObamaCare cheerleaders are cheering anymore. 
Nearly 80 percent of Kentucky's enrollees were simply shoehorned into 
an already-broken Medicaid system, and many of the remaining 20 percent 
found themselves stuck with unaffordable ObamaCare coverage.
  Listen to what this mom from Breckinridge County wrote to say:

       My family is being pushed out of the middle class by the 
     Obamacare law. How can we pay almost $1,200 a month on health 
     insurance?

  Listen to what this father of two boys from Owensboro wrote to tell 
me:

       Before the Affordable Care Act, we paid around $100 bi-
     weekly for the family plan. That has now increased to $235 
     during the same timeframe. It seems these days there is no 
     incentive to work. We are punished for working hard and 
     trying to provide for our children while others are 
     encouraged to not further themselves because if they do they 
     would be in our particular situation. What happened to being 
     rewarded for working hard in America? What happened to the 
     American dream?

  This Kentucky dad is not the only one wondering this; Americans 
across the country continue to demand a better way forward. Americans 
made that clear last November. Kentuckians made that doubly clear again 
last month.
  This is simply the reality. Democrats cannot deny it. They cannot 
deny it. They can try to deny it. Democrats can again dismiss 
Americans' real-life experience as lies. Democrats can continue to 
lecture Americans about their supposed inability to understand just how 
great ObamaCare has been for them. But Americans are intimately 
familiar with the painful reality of ObamaCare.
  Americans want a fresh start. Americans want to see Washington build 
a bridge away from ObamaCare and toward better care for them. That is 
what the bill before us would do. It is something every Senator should 
support, Republicans and Democrats alike. Democrats may have forced 
this law on the middle class. Democrats may own the pain they have 
caused across the country, especially in States like Kentucky. But it 
is not too late for our Democratic colleagues to work with us to build 
a bridge to better care. This is their chance and President Obama's 
chance to begin to make amends for the pain and the hurt they have 
caused.
  For all of the broken promises, for all of the higher costs, for all 
of the failures, this is America's chance to turn the page and write a 
new and more hopeful beginning. This is our chance to work toward a 
healthier and more prosperous future, with true reform that moves 
beyond the failures of a broken law.

                          ____________________