[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 6]
[Senate]
[Pages 8405-8406]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                               TRUMPCARE

  Mr. SCHUMER. Finally, Mr. President, a word on healthcare: The 
Republican attempts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, 
combined with the Trump administration's refusal to commit to making 
key cost-sharing payments that help keep healthcare costs low for 
working Americans, have created great uncertainty in our healthcare 
system. This uncertainty has already caused insurers to flee the 
marketplace or propose rate increases for next year.
  A spokesman for America's Health Insurance plans--that is the 
insurance industry's main group; again, it is not a politician--said:

       We need swift action and long-term certainty [on the cost-
     sharing program]. It is the single most destabilizing factor 
     in the individual market, and millions of Americans could 
     soon feel the impact of fewer choices, higher costs and 
     reduced access to care.

  My Republican colleagues, remember, if you continue to allow the 
President to do this, if we don't make cost sharing permanent, the 
system will deteriorate, and guess whose back it will be on? Yours, my 
Republican friends. You are in charge. And when people get a bad 
healthcare bill, you can blame anyone you want. You are in charge. Fix 
it.
  Refusing to guarantee the cost-sharing payment is nothing short of 
sabotage, and the repeated attempts to pass TrumpCare will only make 
things worse.
  The White House ought to step up and say once and for all that they 
will continue to make the cost-sharing payments permanently, and 
Republicans in Congress ought to drop their repeal efforts and, 
instead, work with us on stabilizing the market and improving our 
healthcare system.
  Now, today the Congressional Budget Office will release its analysis 
of the House Republican healthcare bill--TrumpCare. I remind my 
colleagues how unusual it is for a CBO score to come out nearly 3 weeks 
after a bill has passed. It is like test driving a brand new car 3 
weeks after you have already signed on the dotted line and paid the 
dealer in full.
  Republicans in the House were so worried about how bad the CBO score 
might be, they rushed TrumpCare through--no hearings, no debate, no 
score. Never mind that this legislation remakes one-sixth of our 
Nation's economy. It has life-and-death consequences for millions of 
American families.
  Republicans were haunted by the ghost of CBO scores past, so they 
went ahead without one.
  When the CBO analyzed the first version of TrumpCare earlier this 
year, it concluded that 24 million fewer Americans would have health 
insurance if it became law. We also learned the bill would gut 
Medicaid, crush seniors with higher premiums, and would increase out-
of-pocket expenses for Americans of all ages with higher deductibles 
and copays.
  Given that there were few differences between the first and second 
versions of TrumpCare, we can expect that today's CBO analysis will 
likely show many of the same grave consequences as the first one. Only 
now, of course, TrumpCare includes a new amendment that allows States 
to opt out of the requirement to cover people with preexisting 
conditions. It is hard to imagine such an amendment would make

[[Page 8406]]

CBO's score any better than the last, and it could certainly raise a 
lot of new questions.
  Does the deal the Freedom Caucus got with the second version of 
TrumpCare violate the rules of reconciliation? Will the House have to 
change the bill and take yet another vote on TrumpCare? We know they 
don't want to do that.
  We also don't know the answer to these questions, and we may not know 
the answers even after seeing today's CBO analysis. But all of these 
open questions demonstrate how reckless it was for Republicans to vote 
on this bill without properly vetting it first.
  I yield the floor to my good friend, the senior Senator from Vermont, 
the former and hopefully future Senate President pro tempore.

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