[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Pages 5576-5577]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                               OBAMACARE

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, it is a hard thing to admit you are wrong. 
It is always very difficult. It is not very pleasing to look back and 
say to yourself: Oh, I wish I wasn't so far off; I was way off.
  But as public servants, we have to accept reality, regardless of 
where we may have stood or what we may have said in the past.
  Unfortunately, Republicans in Congress are trying their utmost to 
escape the reality that ObamaCare is a smashing success.
  Just consider a few of the facts--and these are only a few of them: 
16.4 million Americans now have quality health coverage, many for the 
first time in decades, many for the first time in their lives.
  Since 2013, the United States has seen the largest decline in the 
uninsured rate--ever. Nine in ten Americans have health insurance. In 
the last 18 months, the uninsured rate for nonelderly adults has fallen 
by 35 percent. Health care costs have grown at their slowest rate in 50 
years.
  Since 2011, the number of preventable deaths at hospitals and care 
centers has dropped by 50,000. That is 50,000 lives--50,000 people are 
alive today who wouldn't have been but for ObamaCare, and ObamaCare 
enrollees are overwhelmingly satisfied with their coverage.
  Those are the facts. No matter how hard my Republican colleagues try, 
they cannot wish those numbers away. All of the doomsday reports are 
wrong.
  I understand that many Senate Republicans have worked hard to make 
their opposition to ObamaCare their legacy.
  In June of 2009, the Republican leader--the majority leader--was on 
the Senate floor decrying health care reform more than 3 months before 
the bill even passed. His mind was made up before he even saw the bill.
  And so it has been with too many other Republicans in this body, and 
certainly in the other body where they voted--I lost track of it--65 
times to repeal it. Each time it has been a colossal flop.
  The junior Senator from Wyoming, for example, has been relentless in 
his condemnation of ObamaCare. He comes to the floor all the time with 
his charts and everything, but he avoids the facts. He has been 
relentless in his condemnation of ObamaCare--before and after the bill 
was passed. But he is wrong. I don't say so, the facts say so.
  For example, Paul Krugman's piece in the New York Times today 
effectively lays out the options congressional Republicans have with 
respect to ObamaCare. Remember, this isn't some high school teacher 
talking about the merits of ObamaCare, it is a Nobel laureate in 
economics.
  This is what he said today, and I quote part of what he said--simply 
put, Republicans were wrong on ObamaCare. In this body, it is 
understandable for a Senator to be dead wrong on some piece of policy 
from time to time. It happens. But what is not understandable and what 
is not acceptable is for the entire Republican Party to double down on 
its opposition after they have already been proven wrong. It says a lot 
about their inability to govern and, quite frankly, their grasp on 
reality--that Republicans refuse to acknowledge facts.
  That is a reality.
  I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the full piece 
from the New York Times written by Paul Krugman.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the New York Times, Apr. 27, 2015]

                            Nobody Said That

                           (By Paul Krugman)

       Imagine yourself as a regular commentator on public 
     affairs--maybe a paid pundit, maybe a supposed expert in some 
     area, maybe just an opinionated billionaire. You weigh in on 
     a major policy initiative that's about to happen, making 
     strong predictions of disaster. The Obama stimulus, you 
     declare, will cause soaring interest rates; the Fed's bond 
     purchases will ``debase the dollar'' and cause high 
     inflation; the Affordable Care Act will collapse in a vicious 
     circle of declining enrollment and surging costs.
       But nothing you predicted actually comes to pass. What do 
     you do?
       You might admit that you were wrong, and try to figure out 
     why. But almost nobody does that; we live in an age of 
     unacknowledged error.
       Alternatively, you might insist that sinister forces are 
     covering up the grim reality. Quite a few well-known pundits 
     are, or at some point were, ``inflation truthers,'' claiming 
     that the government is lying about the pace of price 
     increases. There have also been many prominent Obamacare 
     truthers declaring that the White House is cooking the books, 
     that the policies are worthless, and so on.
       Finally, there's a third option: You can pretend that you 
     didn't make the predictions you did. I see that a lot when it 
     comes to people who issued dire warnings about interest rates 
     and inflation, and now claim that they did no such thing. 
     Where I'm seeing it most, however, is on the health care 
     front. Obamacare is working better than even its supporters 
     expected--but its enemies say that the good news proves 
     nothing, because nobody predicted anything different.
       Go back to 2013, before reform went fully into effect, or 
     early 2014, before the numbers on first-year enrollment came 
     in. What were Obamacare's opponents predicting? The answer 
     is, utter disaster. Americans, declared a May 2013 report 
     from a House committee, were about to face a devastating 
     ``rate shock,'' with premiums almost doubling on average.
       And it would only get worse: At the beginning of 2014 the 
     right's favored experts--or maybe that should be 
     ``experts''--were warning about a ``death spiral'' in which 
     only the sickest citizens would sign up, causing premiums to 
     soar even higher and many people to drop out of the program.
       What about the overall effect on insurance coverage? 
     Several months into 2014 many leading Republicans--including 
     John Boehner, the speaker of the House--were predicting that 
     more people would lose coverage than gain it. And everyone on 
     the right was predicting that the law would cost far more 
     than projected, adding hundreds of billions if not trillions 
     to budget deficits.
       What actually happened? There was no rate shock: average 
     premiums in 2014 were about 16 percent lower than projected. 
     There

[[Page 5577]]

     is no death spiral: On average, premiums for 2015 are between 
     2 and 4 percent higher than in 2014, which is a much slower 
     rate of increase than the historical norm. The number of 
     Americans without health insurance has fallen by around 15 
     million, and would have fallen substantially more if so many 
     Republican-controlled states weren't blocking the expansion 
     of Medicaid. And the overall cost of the program is coming in 
     well below expectations.
       One more thing: You sometimes hear complaints about the 
     alleged poor quality of the policies offered to newly insured 
     families. But a new survey by J. D. Power, the market 
     research company, finds that the newly enrolled are very 
     satisfied with their coverage--more satisfied than the 
     average person with conventional, non-Obamacare insurance.
       This is what policy success looks like, and it should have 
     the critics engaged in soul-searching about why they got it 
     so wrong. But no.
       Instead, the new line--exemplified by, but not unique to, a 
     recent op-ed article by the hedge-fund manager Cliff Asness--
     is that there's nothing to see here: ``That more people would 
     be insured was never in dispute.'' Never, I guess, except in 
     everything ever said by anyone in a position of influence on 
     the American right. Oh, and all the good news on costs is 
     just a coincidence.
       It's both easy and entirely appropriate to ridicule this 
     kind of thing. But there are some serious stakes here, and 
     they go beyond the issue of health reform, important as it 
     is.
       You see, in a polarized political environment, policy 
     debates always involve more than just the specific issue on 
     the table. They are also clashes of world views. Predictions 
     of debt disaster, a debased dollar, and Obama death spirals 
     reflect the same ideology, and the utter failure of these 
     predictions should inspire major doubts about that ideology.
       And there's also a moral issue involved. Refusing to accept 
     responsibility for past errors is a serious character flaw in 
     one's private life. It rises to the level of real wrongdoing 
     when policies that affect millions of lives are at stake.

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I see no one on the floor, so will the Chair 
announce the business of the day.

                          ____________________