[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 3]
[House]
[Pages 3516-3517]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      THE AMERICAN HEALTH CARE ACT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, we just heard a lot about competition and 
better and improved markets. The basic problem the Republicans have--
and they know this very well--is that the health insurance industry is 
exempt from the antitrust laws of the United States of America, so they 
can, and they do, get together and collude. They collude to drive up 
prices. They collude to share markets: hey, if you are pulling out of 
that State, I will pull out of this State and cut those kind of deals. 
They can't be prosecuted.
  We had a bipartisan vote on the floor of this House when we were 
originally considering the House version of the Affordable Care Act--
infinitely superior to the thing passed by the Senate which we got 
stuck with--and it was over 400 votes to take away their antitrust 
immunity. Is that in this bill? Heck, no. They are the second largest 
PAC contributor to the Republican Party, so I am afraid we are not 
going to take away their antitrust immunity--but we are going to have a 
really free, competitive, and transparent market. You will be able to 
go out and get your policies, whatever the insurance companies have 
decided as they colluded behind closed doors.
  Now, the other issue here is, for some reason, Republicans seem to 
have taken and painted a big target on the back of low- and middle-
income seniors in two ways. They are going to repeal some very small 
taxes on people who earn over one-quarter of a million dollars a year. 
You know, they really need another 4 percent because they are just 
hurting. Those people who earn $1 million, $2 million a year, they are 
hurting. We have got to repeal that tax. So that is one of the highest 
priorities in this bill: repeal that tax.
  Unfortunately, that means that the Medicare trust fund will be 
exhausted 4 years earlier. That is right. The money those very high-
income people are paying goes to Medicare, to the trust fund, which is 
in trouble right now. It is going to be exhausted in 2028. Under their 
plan, it is going to be exhausted in 2024. So they have painted a big 
target on seniors. But don't worry, the seniors can go into the 
competitive--well, not so competitive--insurance market and buy a plan.
  But then another little twist and another arrow in the heart of 
seniors--seniors now, under their plan, instead of a cap of three times 
the cost of a policy to other, younger subscribers, it is now they are 
going to jack it up to five times.
  Why do you hate seniors so much? What is the deal here? Yeah, the 
high-income seniors will do fine. But what about the middle- and low-
income seniors, those who are struggling to make ends meet on Social 
Security and others?
  Then for some other bizarre reason, they have got it in for Planned 
Parenthood. They say it is about abortion. Well, guess what? It is not. 
Federal law has prohibited Federal money from going to abortions for 40 
years. It is not about abortion. It is about something different. It is 
about breast exams, Pap smears, physical exams, STD testing and 
treatment, information and counseling about sexual reproductive health, 
cancer screenings, pregnancy tests, prenatal services, and access to 
affordable birth control.
  Why do they want to kill that for 1 million people, many of whom live 
in rural areas that are already underserved? They don't have an 
alternative for those services. But they want to kill that--oh, just 
for 1 year maybe. Well, actually, they would like to do it permanently, 
but they are going to say: well, we are just going to do it 1 year and 
see how it works out, how those million women do.
  Then, as my colleagues from Connecticut said, everything around here 
has to be scored, and it can't add to the deficit--unless it is 
something they want to do. Now, in this case, this has not been scored. 
We have no idea what it is going to cost the American taxpayer, this 
new Rube Goldberg, and they don't have any analysis of how many people 
are going to lose coverage.

                              {time}  1215

  Now, granted, they put off the huge loss of coverage until 2020. They 
delayed the big changes in Medicaid until 2020. That is when tens of 
millions of people will lose their health insurance. But there are 
still going to be a lot of people losing their health insurance a

[[Page 3517]]

lot sooner, and it would be useful for people to know about that before 
they vote on it: how much is it going to cost the taxpayer and how many 
people are going to lose coverage.
  Under the ruse of fixing something that is broken that has given 23 
million people an opportunity to have health insurance and brought us 
the lowest rate of uninsured in recent history in this country, they 
are cutting taxes for wealthy people. By the way, there is a little 
gift in there for health insurance companies. They can fully deduct 
their CEO's $20 million salary. Today, it is limited to $500,000. So 
another tax break for the health insurance industry.
  Did they take on Big Pharma? Did they do anything about the 
unbelievable price gouging that is going on today through the 
pharmaceutical companies, where someone buys up a generic drug that has 
been around for 50 years and jacks up the price 1,000 percent?
  No, they are not going to do anything about that. We are not going to 
have more affordable prescription drugs. I don't know if they undid the 
fix to the doughnut hole that was in the ObamaCare bill.
  If they really wanted to do something, they would say: Let's have a 
national not-for-profit plan offered in a national exchange so that 
every American can afford health care at a reasonable cost without 
excess profits to an industry which is exempt from antitrust law, 
colludes, and pays their execs $20 million and $50 million a year.

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