[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 7]
[Senate]
[Page 8861]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         HEALTHCARE LEGISLATION

  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, my friends on the other side of the aisle 
continue to work on their healthcare bill behind closed doors. They 
haven't made public a shred of bill text or even considered holding a 
committee hearing to debate the topic. Yesterday my friend the majority 
leader filed a motion to bring TrumpCare directly to the floor, 
skipping the committee process.
  This is a party that screamed from the rafters ``Read the bill, read 
the bill'' when Democrats were putting together the Affordable Care 
Act. We spent over a year debating that bill. We tried with a 
bipartisan group of six to come up with a solution.
  Republicans are putting together their bill in secret, with no 
Democratic input, and then will rush their bill to the floor without a 
single committee hearing, all in the span of 3 short weeks. This is a 
bill that will alter one-sixth of the American economy and affect tens 
of millions of American lives. For many, it will have life-and-death 
consequences.
  The way Republicans are crafting this legislation is pulling the wool 
over the eyes of the American people on one of the most crucial issues 
affecting their lives. Why? There is only one explanation: They don't 
want the American people to see their bill. They don't want to go home 
to townhall meetings and let people give their opinions. Keep it under 
wraps, rush it through? There is only one good reason: They are not 
very proud of the product that they have put together.
  The Republicans know that even if they make some changes to the bill 
that came over from the House--they may increase subsidies a bit or 
lower the amount of tax breaks they give to millionaires--they will 
still wind up with a bill that is far worse than the status quo: higher 
costs, less care. That is because they are working from a fundamentally 
flawed premise, which is to take support away from healthcare programs 
like Medicaid to give a tax break to the wealthiest Americans. Senate 
Republicans can nibble around the edges, but they will not be able to 
excise the rotten core of their healthcare plan.
  The House bill has the support of approximately 18 percent of 
Americans. A majority of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans don't 
like it. Don't you get the message, my Republican friends? We 
understand the ideologues are telling you that you must repeal. But now 
that people have actually looked at repeal, they realize that is not 
the way to go.
  The right approach is not to move backward, not to undo all the 
progress we have made in healthcare over the past 8 years and start 
from scratch. The American people don't want to go back to the days 
when an insurance company could discriminate against you because you 
have a preexisting condition or jack up your rates simply because you 
are older. That is not the kind of healthcare system the American 
people want. But that seems to be what our Republican colleagues, in 
the dark of night, are considering.
  The right approach is to keep all the good things in the existing law 
and work in a bipartisan way to make more progress on lowering costs 
for consumers and improving the quality of care.
  Again, I urge my Republican colleagues to drop their repeal efforts 
and, instead, work with Democrats on actually improving our healthcare 
system.

                          ____________________