[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 8]
[Senate]
[Pages 11016-11017]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                               HEALTHCARE

  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, last night we learned that the current 
Republican healthcare bill lacks enough support to even reach the floor 
of the Senate. After numerous delays, false starts, false predictions, 
and two pulled votes, it should be crystal clear to everyone on the 
other side of the aisle that the core of the bill is unworkable.
  It is time to move on. It is time to start over. Rather than 
repeating the same failed partisan process yet again, Republicans 
should work with Democrats on a bill that lowers premiums, provides 
long-term stability to the markets, and improves our healthcare system.
  I heard the Republican leader this morning say that Democrats 
``decided early on that they did not want to engage seriously'' on 
healthcare. In the same speech, the Republican leader also admitted 
that the very first thing the Republican majority did this Congress was 
to pass reconciliation so they could pass healthcare on a party-line 
vote--50 needed, no Democrats needed. Early on, the majority leader 
told Democrats: We don't need you. We don't want you.
  Respectfully, I take issue with the idea that Democrats didn't want 
to engage on healthcare. The majority leader admitted that he decided 
the matter for us when he locked Democrats out of the process at the 
outset. At the very beginning of this Congress, President Trump and 
Leader McConnell said: Don't come knocking on our door on healthcare. 
We don't need you.
  Now that their one-party effort has largely failed, we hope they will 
change their tune.
  It seems like many Republicans are ready for a truly bipartisan 
effort on healthcare, indeed. My friend Senator McCain has urged it 
quite strongly saying: ``The Congress must now return to regular order, 
hold hearings, [and] receive input from members of both parties.'' He 
said that while recuperating in Arizona. So that is how strongly he 
feels about it.
  Other Republican Senators have made similar comments, but the 
Republican leader still plans to ignore their advice and instead plans 
on holding a proxy vote on a straight repeal of our healthcare law 
first.
  Make no mistake about it. Passing repeal without a replacement would 
be

[[Page 11017]]

a disaster. Our healthcare system would implode. Millions would lose 
coverage. Coverage for millions more would be diminished. Our 
healthcare system would be in such a deep hole that repair would be 
nearly impossible.
  In fact, passing repeal and having it go into effect 2 years later 
is, in many ways, worse than the Republican healthcare bill that was 
just rejected by my Republican colleagues. It is as if our healthcare 
system were a patient who came in and needed some medicine and the 
Republicans propose surgery. The operation was a failure. Now 
Republicans are proposing a second surgery that will surely kill the 
patient. Medicine is needed--bipartisan medicine, not a second surgery.
  We urge our Republican colleagues to change their tune. Passing 
repeal now is not a door to bipartisan solutions, as the majority 
leader suggested this morning. Rather, it is a disaster. The door to 
bipartisanship is open right now, not with repeal but with an effort to 
improve the existing system. The door is open right now. Republican 
leadership only needs to walk through it, as many Republican Members 
are urging.
  The door is to accept the progress we have made in our healthcare 
system and work to improve it. The Affordable Care Act isn't perfect, 
but repealing all of the good things about the law will create such 
chaos that there will hardly be anything left to repair.
  Republicans don't need to wreak havoc on our healthcare system first 
in order to get Democrats to the table. We are ready to sit down right 
now, if Republicans abandon cuts to Medicaid, abandon huge tax breaks 
for the wealthy, and agree to go through the regular order--through the 
committees, with hearings, and onto the floor with time for amendments. 
That is how we perfect legislation here. That is how it has been done 
for 200 years.
  Almost inevitably, when you try to draft something behind closed 
doors and do not vet it with the public, it becomes a failure--in this 
case, a disaster. So again our Republican colleagues don't need to 
wreak havoc on our healthcare system first in order to get Democrats to 
the table. We are ready to sit down right now, again, if Republicans 
abandon cuts to Medicaid, abandon tax breaks for the wealthy, and agree 
to go through the regular order. The door to bipartisanship is open 
right now. Republicans only need to walk through it.
  I would remind my Republican friends that the CBO has already scored 
the idea of a clean repeal bill, and it would be a catastrophe. Listen 
to what the nonpartisan CBO said. The head of CBO is appointed by the 
Republican leader of the Senate and the Republican leader of the House. 
Here is what CBO said about repeal: It would cause 32 million Americans 
to lose their insurance. Premiums would double, while cutting taxes for 
households with incomes over a million dollars by over $50,000 a year. 
It would end Medicaid expansion with no grace period or option for 
States that like their Medicaid expansion and want to keep it. In many 
ways, it is just as cruel, if not crueler, to Medicaid as the TrumpCare 
bill, but in a different way.
  So I would expect that the same Senators who are concerned about the 
TrumpCare bill's Medicaid cuts will be equally concerned about what 
repeal and delay would do to Medicaid. Many of my Republican friends 
rejected roundly the idea of repeal and delay several months ago at the 
beginning of the year when President Trump first proposed it and it 
seemed like that was really what Republicans would do. Here are just 
some of the names back then who said repeal and then replace later 
doesn't work: Cassidy, Alexander, Collins, Corker, Cotton, Hatch, 
Isakson, Moran, McCain, Murkowski, Paul.
  Well, I would tell those colleagues and all of the others: The idea 
hasn't magically gotten better with age. It is still nothing more than 
a cut-and-run approach to healthcare that will leave millions of 
Americans out in the cold and will raise costs on everyone--the young, 
the old, the sick, the healthy, working Americans, and middle-class 
families. Everyone will be hurt but the very, very wealthy.
  Every day that Republicans spend on trying to pass their now failed 
partisan TrumpCare bill, every day they spend cooking up new tricks to 
bully their Members to get on a healthcare bill is another day wasted, 
another day that could have been spent working on real improvements to 
our healthcare system.
  Democrats want to work with our colleagues on the Republican side to 
stabilize the marketplaces and improve the cost and quality of care, 
and we want to do it via regular order, a process this body has used 
time and again to produce consensus, bipartisan, historic legislation.
  The majority leader said in 2014, in a speech entitled ``Restoring 
the Senate,'' ``When the Senate is allowed to work the way it was 
designed to, it arrives at a result acceptable to people all along the 
political spectrum.'' But if it is ``an assembly line for one party's 
partisan legislative agenda,'' it creates ``instability and strife'' 
rather than ``good stable law.''
  I want to repeat that. These are the words of Leader Mitch McConnell. 
I hope Leader McConnell is listening and remembers these words. He 
hasn't for the last 6 months, and it has only led to trouble for him 
and his Republican colleagues in the Senate. Let me read it again, the 
2014 speech, ``Restoring the Senate'' by Mitch McConnell. ``When the 
Senate is allowed to work the way it was designed to, it arrives at a 
result acceptable to people all along the political spectrum. But if 
it's ``an assembly line for one party's partisan legislative agenda,'' 
it creates ``instability and strife'' rather than ``good stable law.''
  Leader McConnell, I couldn't agree more. It is time to start over on 
healthcare, abandon the idea of cutting Medicaid to give a tax break to 
the wealthy, abandon this new repeal and run, and use the regular order 
to arrive ``at a result acceptable to people all along the political 
spectrum,'' as Leader McConnell once said. I dare say it would create a 
much better result for the American people as well.
  Thank you.
  I yield the floor.

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