[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 12339-12341]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 WORKING TOGETHER TO IMPROVE OBAMACARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2017, the gentleman from California (Mr. Ted Lieu) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. TED LIEU of California. Mr. Speaker, the collapse of TrumpCare in 
the Senate shows that we need a new way. The process from the very 
beginning was fatally flawed. The plan was really behind closed doors. 
There were no hearings. No witnesses, no doctors, no insurance plans, 
no patients, no nurses, nobody could testify in front of Congress and 
let people know about the current healthcare system.
  I am not ObamaCare. I am willing to work with Republicans, with the 
President, with Democrats to update and improve ObamaCare. Any law can 
be made better, but to repeal ObamaCare without a plan is a really 
stupid way to go about it, and to repeal it with an even worse plan 
known as TrumpCare is an even more stupid way to go about it.
  The version that the House passed was going to cause 23 million 
people to lose their health insurance, increase premiums in 2018 and 
2020, and then take people with preexisting conditions and give them 
enormously higher costs. No wonder the Senate killed that version.
  Now we are in a position where the Republicans, instead of trying 
four, five, six, seven, eight different versions of TrumpCare, they 
should do the one thing they haven't yet tried, which is 
bipartisanship.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlemen from Arizona (Mr. Gallego), who 
will make some comments as well.
  Mr. GALLEGO. Mr. Speaker, first of all, my experience with the 
Affordable Care Act actually comes from the State legislature, where, 
in a bipartisan manner, the Republican governor joined with the 
minority Democrats and a handful of Republicans in the Senate State 
House to pass Medicaid expansion.
  Why did we do that?
  If you looked at what was happening in Arizona, it was some of the 
Trump areas, as I like to call them, these rural districts where the 
rural hospitals, which are not only the medically necessary 
infrastructure of the area but also the economic drivers, the only 
high-wage employers in the area, they were about to shut down.
  There was so much uncompensated cost, because people were using the 
emergency room as their primary care doctor, that these hospitals were 
starting to have to charge more and insurance companies were starting 
to refuse to pay more for their premiums, that they needed to respond 
to that.
  In the end, what we started hearing from these hospitals is that we 
are going to have to shut down the emergency room, and if you have an 
emergency, we are going to have to helicopter you either to Tucson or 
Phoenix.
  Now, for many of you guys who are not Southwesterners like us in the 
Southwest, we have a lot of territory and a lot of land. For you to 
just drive to Phoenix for emergency care would be pretty insane, let 
alone the expense of helicoptering into Phoenix was even more so than 
that.
  Because we had the goal of actually increasing and improving our 
healthcare outcomes, we worked again in a bipartisan manner with 
Governor Brewer, with Republicans and Democrats to pass one of the most 
comprehensive Medicaid expansion bills in the country that has actually 
turned around, lowered costs, created better healthcare outcomes, and 
has now insured more than 400,000 poor Arizonans that did not have it 
before, including people in the disability community, as well as 
children.

                              {time}  1315

  To counteract what we saw today, if it wasn't really for the bravery 
of Senator Murkowski, Senator Collins, and Senator McCain, as well as 
all of the Senate Democrats, what we would have seen would have been a 
bill that would not only have just rolled back the millions of people 
who are now covered with health insurance, but it would also have been 
detrimental to the people who currently have even private health 
insurance.
  Premiums were going to go up for everybody. The estimated amount of 
people just on the so-called skinny bill that were going to lose health 
insurance would be 16 million people, and on the House bill it was 
going to be 23 million people, in addition to the essential gutting of 
Medicaid, all for giving a tax cut to the top 1 percent.
  Now, this is bad policy, but it is worse policy when you don't have 
an open process to it, when you seek it through the middle of the 
night, hoping that the American public is just going to accept what 
comes out.
  There is a reason why TrumpCare was polling less than Congress, and 
trust me, it is very difficult to poll less than Congress. At this 
point, it is just our families that like us.
  Mr. TED LIEU of California. I like you.
  Mr. GALLEGO. I like you, too, Ted. You are a good man.
  But the fact that we the American public knew so little, just knew 
enough, and said this bill is bad and were able to come out and put 
pressure on our Senators and our Members of Congress with public 
hearings and townhalls was key to stopping this.
  Lastly, before I move back to Ted, if you are so proud of this bill, 
if you are the Senate Republicans and you are so proud of this bill, if 
you are Donald Trump and you are so proud of this bill, even our House 
colleagues, why didn't you have consistent townhalls? Why didn't you go 
out there and explain to people what you were planning to do and why 
this is better for America?
  Instead, they tried to hide it. They tried to move it as fast as 
possible, and then tried to schedule a vote in the middle of the night. 
If you have to vote for something in the middle of the night, it means 
you are not very confident and you are not very proud of that bill.
  So what is the solution now? Nobody in the Democratic Caucus thinks 
the Affordable Care Act--or ObamaCare, as some people call it--is the 
be-all and end-all. We don't think it is perfect. We certainly think 
that there is a great bipartisan approach we can take to make it 
better. And what I mean by ``better'' is more coverage, lower premiums, 
and better healthcare outcomes.

[[Page 12340]]

  When I use those words, those were almost exactly, word for word, 
what Donald Trump said he wanted to see happen when he was going to 
replace the Affordable Care Act.
  But, point by point, whether it was the bill that came through the 
House or the bill that came through the Senate, none of those would 
have even fit Donald Trump's mandate. Which is why, at the end of the 
day, that bill was radioactive. Nobody liked it, and they had to hide 
it.
  So what we should do is follow the advice of Senator McCain in 
Arizona, follow the example of Senators Murkowski and Collins and all 
of the Senate Democrats: get back to regular order and work out an 
actual fix to the Affordable Care Act and get Americans more coverage, 
lower premiums, and better healthcare outcomes.
  I say that also as someone who is on an ObamaCare plan. I am not 
exempt from it, and neither is Mr. Lieu. We are in it just as much as 
everyone else is, and we want to see it fixed.
  Mr. TED LIEU of California. Mr. Speaker, Representative Gallego and I 
both served on Active Duty in the United States military. Before we 
could do that, we had to take an oath to the Constitution. That is the 
same oath that Members of Congress take, and it is also an oath that 
members of the executive branch take.
  Under the Constitution, Congress passes the laws. ObamaCare is the 
law of the land. Under the Constitution, the President has a duty to 
enforce those laws.
  Today, the President tweeted that he wants ObamaCare to implode. Not 
only is that mean, mean, mean, it is also a dereliction of duty. The 
job of the President is to help Americans, not hurt millions of 
Americans out of spite.
  Let me give you an example of what it was like before ObamaCare.
  I was at a restaurant and a waitress came up to me. She knew I was a 
legislator. I was in the State legislature at the time, and she wanted 
help. Her daughter had just turned 18, and, in California, where I am 
from, you cannot get government health insurance if you don't have any 
minor children. So she lost her government health insurance.
  She was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. She tried to get 
private insurance. None of them would cover her. And I realized that 
she is now going to slowly die because she could not get health 
insurance coverage.
  She could not go into an emergency room and get treatment because her 
breast cancer had not progressed to that point. But one day she is 
going to get to that point. She will go to an emergency room; she will 
get treated for a few days; and then she will die. And I thought, in a 
country as great as America, that should never be happening.
  Now that the Affordable Care Act is the law of the land, you cannot 
be discriminated against because of your preexisting conditions. There 
are some incredibly amazing elements of this law. That is why the 
Republicans could not repeal it. Because the American people, after 
looking at it for 7 years, the majority said, you know, this is a 
pretty good deal. Is it the best deal? No. We could definitely make it 
better.
  Mr. Speaker, Representative Gallego and I are offering to the 
Republicans and Speaker Ryan to engage in bipartisanship. The one thing 
we are asking the Speaker to do is to not enable the President to 
sabotage the Affordable Care Act. Not only is that wrong, but it would 
be enabling his dereliction of duty, and it will cause millions of 
Americans to suffer greatly just out of spite.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Gallego).
  Mr. GALLEGO. Mr. Speaker, if you want to hear some ideas--and I think 
it is important that instead of just us knocking what was introduced, 
we could also give some ideas--certainly, for me, and I think I am also 
speaking for Ted Lieu, we would prefer to have Medicare for all, so 
people have a stable insurance, a system that we know works, a system 
that actually brings down costs. But if we can't do that, there are 
many things we can do in the meantime.
  Why not drop the age of Medicare eligibility to 55? If you do that, 
you are going to also decrease premiums for people who are not on 
Medicare, people who are just buying private health insurance. You 
could be on Medicare at 55 and still be working.
  What about for those counties that don't have private insurers on the 
subsidized market? They should be able to buy into the Federal health 
insurance plans of all of the workers who live in those districts, or 
buy into the plans that Ted and I have. Why can't we let them do that?
  Why not cover every U.S. citizen up until the age of 18 under 
Medicaid to relieve the parents of that burden?
  We can also start looking at community health centers, reinforcing 
those to make sure that we are taking the poorest of the poor who 
actually cost the most when it comes to healthcare costs and, instead 
of forcing them into a hospital or into a primary care situation, they 
could get consistent care without putting a burden on the overall 
medical system.
  There are tons of ideas that we could be working on with our 
colleagues that will, again, fulfill President Trump's goal of lower 
costs, lower premiums, and better healthcare outcomes. So this doesn't 
have to be a static situation. This doesn't have to be an either/or.
  President Trump is making it sound like, because we did not pass his 
idea of reform, we must collapse the whole system. That is unnecessary, 
that is irresponsible, and that is not how adult people that legislate 
act.
  You can fix this. We can fix this so more people can have healthcare 
coverage, more people can have that security that they are going to 
always have health insurance so they can go and start a business and 
know they are going to have health insurance, know that they can send 
their kid to college and they are still going to have health insurance, 
know that they can retire knowing that they have been healthy the whole 
time and they are going to have a good, dignified retirement because we 
had made sure that we established a good healthcare system from the 
time they were born until the time they retire.
  This is possible. This is possible.
  Mr. TED LIEU of California. Mr. Speaker, in conclusion, the House of 
Representatives is going to go on recess in August. Now is the time for 
millions of people across America to contact their Member, ask them to 
hold townhalls, ask them to explain their vote on the awful TrumpCare 
legislation that passed the House, and ask them to now work with 
Democrats and work on a bipartisan basis to improve ObamaCare. Now is 
the time for millions of Americans to speak up. They have the entire 
month of August to contact their Member of Congress, and I urge them to 
do so.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Gallego).
  Mr. GALLEGO. Mr. Speaker, lastly, I will close with this. If you were 
one of those Members of Congress, if you are a Republican Senator or a 
Republican Member of Congress who voted to gut the Affordable Care Act, 
there is time. There is a way to come back from that really bad 
decision. You can turn around and start working for the betterment of 
this country by trying to fix the Affordable Care Act.
  The American public will look kindly upon those legislators who are 
here to work in a bipartisan manner to, again, lower costs, lower 
premiums, and provide more coverage and better healthcare outcomes. 
There is time to do this. But there is not time for more opportunities 
to gut this, for more time to kick people off Medicaid, or for more 
time to create some kind of situation that is only go to raise 
premiums.
  If we allow Trump to actually, in his words, make the whole thing 
fail, it is not ObamaCare that fails, it is not the Affordable Care Act 
that fails--it is the American people that fail. He is playing a game 
with the lives of the American people.
  What he is going to do is he is going to cause millions of people to 
either lose their insurance because insurance companies are going to 
have to start shedding people, or premiums are going

[[Page 12341]]

to end up going up because, if he creates instability in the market, 
these insurance companies are going to try to recoup their costs 
somehow, and it is going to discourage younger individuals from 
actually coming on and buying into the ObamaCare insurance pool, which, 
again, will raise premiums. This is unnecessary.
  Mr. Speaker, for those Members of Congress and those Senators who 
want to work with us, the first step is to encourage and stop the 
President from sabotaging the Affordable Care Act and to work 
diligently in a bipartisan manner to fix the Affordable Care Act and 
cover more people.
  Mr. TED LIEU of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of 
my time.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Members are reminded to refrain from 
engaging in personalities toward the President.

                          ____________________