[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 6]
[Senate]
[Pages 8747-8748]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                               TRUMPCARE

  Mr. SCHUMER. Now, Mr. President, on another matter: healthcare.
  Yesterday, the insurer Anthem pulled out of exchanges in Ohio, citing 
the administration's decision to hold cost-sharing reduction payments 
hostage as the reason for its exit. Anthem joins a growing list of 
health insurers that have chosen to leave the 2018 marketplace or 
considered raising their rates as a result of the uncertainty the 
President and Republicans are causing--deliberately, in my judgment--in 
our healthcare system.
  The President and Republicans blame ObamaCare for insurers leaving 
the marketplace. It is simply not true. The nonpartisan Congressional 
Budget Office said it is the ``substantial uncertainty about 
enforcement of the individual mandate and about future payments of the 
cost-sharing subsidies'' that have led insurers to withdraw from the 
current marketplace. AHIP, which is hardly a Democratic group--it is 
the largest trade group of insurers and is completely nonpartisan--said 
the uncertainty about cost-sharing payments was ``the single most 
destabilizing factor in the individual market.''
  The Affordable Care Act is not falling under its own weight. It is 
being sabotaged deliberately by President Trump and Republicans who 
have been whipping up all of this uncertainty to gain political 
advantage, to say: ``I told you so.'' They are hurting millions of 
people. That is really wrong.
  After downplaying weeks of expectations in moving forward, yesterday 
our Republican colleagues said they expect to have a repeal bill passed 
by June 30. That is 23 days from today. From all reports, the efforts 
by Republican Senators to craft a different TrumpCare will be based on 
many of the provisions in the House bill--a bill that would remove the 
guarantee of coverage for preexisting conditions, raise rates on some 
older Americans by as much as 800 percent, and decimate Medicaid, which 
so helps rural folks, folks with a family member in a nursing home, and 
those suffering from opioid abuse. It would also leave 23 million more 
Americans without health insurance.
  I remind all of my colleagues on the other side that drafting a 
Senate Republican healthcare bill that is based on a House bill is 
putting lipstick on a pig. TrumpCare is fundamentally flawed, has been 
rejected overwhelmingly by the American people of all political 
stripes, and will devastate our healthcare system in order to finance 
massive tax breaks for the wealthiest of Americans. There is no amount 
of window dressing that can fix up a flawed concept.
  I say to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle that even if 
the proposal is 10 or 20 percent better than the House bill, it ain't 
close to being good enough for the American people. Republicans ought 
to drop the repeal. Choose to work with Democrats to actually improve 
our healthcare system, not to sabotage it.

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