“[President Obama] promised insurance rates would go down by $2,500 per family if his health care law was passed and signed. And in fact, the exact opposite has occurred.”
Click here to watch Sen. Barrasso’s remarks.
WASHINGTON, D.C.— Today, U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) delivered the following remarks on the Senate floor highlighting the rising costs of health insurance under Obamacare.
Transcript of Senator Barrasso’s remarks:
“I come to the floor today to talk once again about the health care law.
“This past weekend, I was home again in Wyoming, as I am just about every weekend. I was in a community called Lovell, Wyoming.
“In Lovell, we had a health and fitness fair. It was focused on kids and adults in terms of prevention of problems, early detection of problems. People could get their blood tests done there.
“And talking to hundreds of people there at the hospital, what I heard again and again, as I do each weekend, is that this health care law is having a negative impact, a hurtful impact on the people of my home state of Wyoming.
“I want to just spend a little time today talking about what’s happening there.
“On Monday night, Senator Enzi and I had a chance to have a telephone town hall meeting, talked to a lot of people around the state.
“This continues to come up. The high increases in costs in spite of what the president promised.
“He promised insurance rates would go down by $2,500 per family if his health care law was passed and signed. And in fact the exact opposite has occurred.
“Today I had lunch with a number of students from Lander, Wyoming, in Freemont County. This again came up as a topic of discussion.
“What we see is that insurance companies at this time of year are turning in their rate requests – the requests that they have to increase their rates for next year. And those rates are becoming public.
“For instance, some families in Iowa – and I’m going to talk about places all around the country now because it’s not just Wyoming that’s suffering under the health care law, but it’s all around the country. Families in Iowa now know that their insurance company wants to raise premiums by as much as 43 percent for some plans.
“Some families in New York have learned that their rates may be going up as much as 46 percent.
“And let’s turn to New Hampshire. There are families in New Hampshire who’ve gotten the news that they could be paying 45 percent more.
“So you kind of look state by state by state, and what we’re seeing across the country rates going up dramatically impacting the ability of people to even afford their insurance.
“There’s a health care group that looked at nine states where information has been released.
“They found that for what they call a standard shopper, the average cost of a silver plan, which is the most commonly sold plan, would go up about 16 percent next year.
“Now, that’s for a typical, 50-year old person who doesn’t smoke – and it adds up to an average cost of almost $6,300 per year for that person trying to buy insurance.
“So today, what we’re seeing is more and more people are getting sticker shock under Obamacare.
“The health care law has created so many problems for the American public, for taxpayers because taxes have gone up as a result of this. For providers of health care and certainly for patients.
“The health care law has caused mandates, has put restrictions in place.
“It’s been made so expensive that most people think it’s not a good deal for them personally, which is why in terms of the number of people that were uninsured when the law was passed, fewer than one in three of them has actually signed up for Obamacare.
“That’s because all these mandates, all these restrictions have made insurance much more expensive when it comes down to actually trying to get care.
“Let me point out the president is very specific when he talks.
“He doesn’t talk about people getting care. He talks about coverage.
“Well, the headlines in The New York Times have been that there are lots of people with coverage who can’t get care.
“The story last week about so many people in New York City who feel that Obamacare is a second-class program, and that they have that insurance card but it doesn’t help them get to see a doctor – and certainly not one that they want or need for the problems that they’re having.
“Now, some insurance companies have lost so much money by selling insurance on the Obamacare exchange that they decided to drop out of the exchanges entirely.
“They said we’re done with it. We cannot afford to sell it this way.
“We know that the insurance company Humana is dropping out of several states.
“We know United Health is leaving all but a handful of states.
“In Colorado, 20,000 people have gotten letters saying that they’re losing their insurance plan next year because companies can’t afford to sell it.
“It’s only going to get worse.
“According to a recent survey by McKinsey & Company, it turns out that only one out of every four health insurance companies made a profit last year. Those are the ones I’m talking about specifically selling insurance on the Obamacare exchange.
“One out of four made a profit, three out of four lost money.
“And you say how is it that they were able to make a profit?
“Well, this is what they did.
“The ones that were able to make a profit tended to be companies that have a lot of experience offering Medicaid coverage.
“So they basically just took their Medicaid plans and sold them to people on the Obamacare exchange.
“These are plans with very narrow networks of doctors, so you can’t just go to any doctor you like. Very narrow number of hospitals, so you can’t go to any hospital you like.
“And for these specific companies, a lot of these plans also come with very high deductibles.
“So, somebody may have an insurance card but the deductible is so high, the dollar per dollar out of their pocket expense that they say they can’t afford to see a doctor and they have Obamacare, which they’re finding is essentially useless for them.
“You know, there were different levels of insurance plans that the Obamacare plan came out with: bronze and silver, gold, platinum.
“Most people have been choosing silver plans because that was thought to be sort of the mid-range plan.
“Well, now those silver plans are starting to come with some very high costs.
“This means that people may be paying again for coverage, but they’re not getting care.
“There’s a company in Virginia, and what they’ve decided to do, interestingly, is to get rid of their bronze plans entirely, and pushing all of those customers up onto the silver plans.
“If you’re one of those people that has had the bronze plan they’re not going to sell anymore, you can see your rates going up 70 percent more than what you’re paying this year. So increases 70 percent.
“Some silver plans have gotten so inadequate, they’re now what the bronze plans used to be.
“So, this is all as a result of what the Obama administration has forced down the throats of the American public and every Democrat voted for and every Republican voted against.
“One insurance company is actually offering a silver plan next year that comes with a deductible of more than $7,000.
“That’s how much someone would need to pay out-of-pocket before insurance actually kicked in.
“Blue Cross of Idaho is talking about a deductible for their silver plan of $6,850.
“That’s for a silver plan – the ones that the Democrats said was supposed to be the benchmark plan. The one that the subsidies are linked to.
“Well, let’s think about what a $6,850 deductible means for most people.
“According to a new poll by the Associated Press, two-thirds of all Americans say they would have a hard time actually coming up with $1,000 for an emergency.
“How are they supposed to come up with $6,800 in case of a situation they may find confronting them.
“These kinds of plans – where people pay a lot and don’t get much in return – are what the President Obama and the administration used to call ‘junk insurance.’
“He said that the health care law would stop that. That that would never happen under the Obama administration and the Obama plan.
“Instead, this president under Obamacare is pushing more and more people into these kinds of plans.
“And this administration is even subsidizing them.
“So the premiums are going through the roof.
“The deductibles are going up so high that people have insurance, which is mandated by law that they have, but it turns out that for many of them, it’s useless.
“People may have to find a new primary care physician or a new pediatrician every year because they’re getting switched from plan to plan to plan because they can’t afford the plan that they have. And the rates continue to go up.
“And the president, who once said that if you like your plan, you can keep it. Now he says, oh no, no, you better shop around.
“People continue to lose plans because their insurance companies are going out of business, or just quit selling insurance entirely.
“To me, this is just one more sign that this health care law is a sinking ship. It’s falling apart.
“Insurance companies have found that one reason that they’re losing so much money is because their customers are sicker than the president thought they would be and that the insurance companies thought they would be.
“The people who are healthy aren’t interested in buying this very expensive Obamacare insurance. They feel it’s a wasting of their money, and they’d rather pay the fine to the I.R.S.
“On Monday, the head of the state Obamacare co-op in New Mexico was on CNBC, the television network, talking about this problem.
“His name is Dr. Martin Hickey, and he’s the CEO of New Mexico Health Connections.
“His company is asking to raise premiums for some of its plans by 34 percent next year.
“Still, he said, ‘With these heavy rate increases, the problem is the people who are going to say ‘for a $695 penalty, to heck with it.’’ That’s what we hear from this C.E.O.
“It’s just what Republicans have been predicting ever since Democrats first brought this health care law to the floor and they passed this extraordinarily expensive law and mandates on the American public.
“Dr. Hickey said, ‘The healthy abandon insurance, and what you’re left with is the sick – and you can never raise your rates high enough.’
“That’s not what Democrats on this floor promised. That’s not what they stood up on this floor and talked about.
“They promised, and so did President Obama, that health care rates would go down.
“They promised insurance coverage would get better. It’s not – it’s gotten much worse.
“They promised that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. In many cases, you can’t.
“They promised that if you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance. In many cases you cannot.
“People all across the country are getting a reminder of Obamacare’s broken promises as the health care requests for increases come out.
“Democrats want to double down on their failed health care law, and add more mandates and more restrictions.
“They want more government control over people’s health care.
“It seems that everything Democrats propose just make prices go up faster.
“This isn’t what the American people wanted and it’s certainly not what we needed from health care reform from health care reform. This law was passed six years ago- and I’ll tell you, it is just getting worse every day.”
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