Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2015--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, tonight President Obama will be coming to Congress to deliver his final State of the Union Address. His advisers have been all over television talking about what the President is planning to say. Tonight, I expect President Obama will talk a little about the health care law. Last year in his State of the Union Address, the President bragged--he actually bragged--that more people have insurance now than when he took office. I expect he will probably say something similar tonight.

I wish to talk a little bit about the other side of the story. I want to talk about what President Obama is not going to say tonight to the American people. The President is not going to admit that many Americans are actually worse under his health care law. He is not going to say that under the health care law there is a very big difference between health law insurance and being able to actually get health care. The President focuses on the word ``coverage'' and, as a doctor, I focus on the word ``care.''

The New York Times had an article about this just the other day. The article on page 1 of Monday, January 4, says: ``Many Holdouts Roll the Dice And Pay I.R.S., Not an Insurer.'' They would rather pay the penalty to the Internal Revenue Service rather than pay the insurance company. Why?

Turn to page A9 of the same day, January 4, 2016: ``Many Who Refuse Insurance See I.R.S. Penalty as Most Affordable Option.'' The most affordable option for the American people is not the Obama health law insurance. It is actually paying the IRS the penalty. The article tells the story about a number of different people. One is named Tim Fescoe from Culver City, CA. He and his wife had an insurance plan that cost them more than $5,000 a year, but it came with a deductible of over $6,000 for each of them--$5,000 for the policy, $6,000 for the deductible for him and another $6,000 for her. Well, they decided to drop the insurance last year.

Mr. Fescoe told the New York Times: ``It literally covered zero medical expenses.''

I wonder if President Obama is going to talk about this man tonight, Tim Fescoe. Will we hear anything about him in his speech tonight? Will the President point to him in the gallery as somebody who the President claims to have helped by making insurance so expensive and so unaffordable that it was much better to just pay the penalty than deal with what the mandates of the President's health care law call into play? Is he going to talk about the deductibles and how the out-of- pocket costs have become so high for Americans all across the country?

The article also talks about Clint Murphy of Sulfur Springs, TX. Clint Murphy expects that he will have to pay a penalty of about $1,800 for being uninsured this year. The article says that in his view, paying the penalty is worth it if he can avoid buying the President's law health insurance, a policy that costs $2,900 or more.

This man in Texas went on to say: ``I don't see the logic behind that, and I'm just not going to do it.''

Is President Obama going to talk about these people--people who think that it is better to pay the steep IRS penalty than buy the President's expensive and, in many ways, useless insurance? There are millions of Americans in this same situation as Clint Murphy, as Tim Fescoe, and other people who are mentioned in a story in the New York Times. If the New York Times is writing about it--they are supporters of the health care law--even they are pointing to the damage that this very unpopular law continues to do to the American people.

According to a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, about 7 million Americans were finding it cheaper to pay the tax penalty than to pay for this unusable insurance. Look at this chart. Of those people who don't get subsidies and are not eligible for subsidies, 95 percent would pay--all of these people--less for the tax penalty than for an ObamaCare bronze plan, which is the cheapest level of plan that there is.

So for people who don't get a subsidy from Washington, 95 percent of them would pay less by paying the tax penalty than they would for an ObamaCare bronze-level plan with high deductibles and high copays--so high that the people who look at it say: It is unusable.

Now, remember, again, these bronze plans are the cheapest option, and the people are just saying no because even the cheapest option under ObamaCare is more expensive than dropping insurance and paying the penalty. Bronze plans are the ones most likely to have a $5,000 to $6,000 deductible per individual on the plan.

Do we expect President Obama to talk about any of these things tonight or any of these people who have been harmed by his law?

After the President gives his State of the Union Address, much has been made that he is going on a tour of America. He is going to visit Baton Rouge, LA, and Omaha, NE. What the President may not know and certainly won't mention is how much ObamaCare premiums have increased in those States he is going to visit.

In Louisiana, prices for the benchmark silver plan on the ObamaCare exchange went up over 9 percent this year. In Nebraska, the same benchmark silver plan rates went up almost 12 percent this past year. Now that is for the people who are willing to actually shop around and switch their insurance from last year to try to hold down the costs.

Remember when the President said this: If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. Well, if you only want a 9-percent or a 12-percent increase, you can't keep your plan. You have to try to shop around and switch to a different plan, maybe even change your doctors and the hospital you go to. That is the only way you can find rates of insurance that still go up a lot but don't go up even higher by staying with what you had.

The President probably won't mention that when he goes to Louisiana or Nebraska. He probably won't mention either that the ObamaCare co-ops in both of the States that he is visiting collapsed last year-- fundamentally collapsed. Tens of thousands of people lost the insurance they had in those States, and now the taxpayers are on the hook for over $100 million.

The law has not come anywhere near what President Obama promised the people of Louisiana or the people of Nebraska or the people of America. All across the country, the American people know that ObamaCare was not what they wanted. They know that it has never been the right answer for the problems in our health care system. That is why majorities in both Houses of Congress voted recently to repeal the key parts of the Obama health care law. We passed the legislation, and we sent it to the President's desk. When President Obama vetoed the bill, he rejected the judgment of the American people.

In his speech tonight, I expect the President to continue to pretend that there are no problems at all with American health care under his law. Well, Republicans are going to keep offering solutions to fix health care in America. Almost 6 years ago President Obama sat down with Members of Congress to try to sell us his health care law. I was part of that roundtable discussion. I told the President at the time that low-cost catastrophic plans could be a good option for people as long as they could use health savings accounts to help pay their day to day medical bills.

The President had no interest in that idea or in any of the Republican ideas that we brought forward that day.

So now, under his law, people are left with the equivalent of catastrophic coverage and they are paying far too much for it because of all of the law's mandates. On top of that, the law cuts back on health savings accounts. The law specifically cut back on that so people all across the country have fewer options to help them pay for their care.

Republicans are going to continue to bring up better ideas. We will talk about real solutions that give people more options, not more mandates. We will talk about the ideas that help people get the care they need from a doctor they want at lower costs, not just as the President talks about coverage--coverage that most Americans find they cannot use.

Tonight President Obama is probably going to make a lot more promises. When he does, I think everybody should remember Clint Murphy from Sulfur Springs, TX, who doesn't see the logic in paying for overpriced ObamaCare insurance. They should remember all of the broken promises from the health care law and all of the hardworking Americans who have been hurt by the Obama health care law. Even though President Obama won't admit it tonight, America can do much better. If the President won't say it, then it will be up to Congress to lead on the issue. That is exactly what Republicans intend to do. President Obama's speech tonight will be looking to define his legacy. Tonight and for the rest of the year, Republicans will be offering solutions for the American people.

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