Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to discuss more of the troubling news that has come out on how the health care law has affected the people of this country. A new poll just came out from National Public Radio as well as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This is what they found: According to the poll, 26 percent of Americans are telling us that the health care law--ObamaCare--has directly hurt them. Twenty-six percent of Americans say that ObamaCare, the health care law, has directly hurt them. Only 14 percent of the people in the poll said that their personal health care has gotten better under ObamaCare. So it is just one in seven who say it is better; over one- quarter say they have personally been hurt. So almost twice as many people have been directly hurt by the law compared to the people who have been helped.

American taxpayers are also being hurt by ObamaCare because of the waste and the fraud in the health care system. There is a new report just out from the Government Accountability Office. It came out last week. It found that the Obama administration is still failing to stop the fraud in health care subsidies.

Here is how the law was designed to work: People must have government-approved insurance because of the law. It is a mandate. There are a lot of people who have been forced to buy very expensive insurance to comply with the law, and in many cases it is far more coverage than they want, that they need, or that they can afford. So the health care law, which the Democrats voted for and the Republicans voted against, said that the government will give subsidies to people to help them pay for this Washington-mandated, expensive insurance.

To get the subsidy, people are supposed to be able to prove they are eligible for the subsidy. There are various criteria to make sure people are eligible. That means things like proving they make a certain income or how many people are in their family or that they are citizens of the United States or that they are here legally.

Washington then pays the subsidy directly to the insurance company. Then later, the government comes around and tries to figure out if the person even qualified for the money, so there is a huge potential for fraud and for wasting taxpayer dollars.

This new report from the Government Accountability Office found that, despite the billions of dollars at stake, the Obama administration has taken what they describe as a ``passive approach'' to identifying and preventing the fraud. The Obama administration has taken a ``passive approach.'' It says the Obama administration has struggled--struggled to confirm the eligibility of millions of people who applied for subsidies. This is a report from the Government Accountability Office. We want accountability in government.

The report found that there are 431,000 people who still had unresolved issues with the subsidy paperwork more than a year after they first applied. The cases amount to over $1.7 billion in taxpayer subsidies. Now, the insurance coverage that these people had for that year has already ended. The Obama administration still did not know if they should have gotten the money that was sent out to the insurance companies on their behalf.

There are another 22,000 cases where it still is not clear if the person who got the subsidy was serving time in prison. How can Washington not even know if someone is in prison? This should be one of the easiest things to find out. But there are millions of cases where the administration is taking this passive approach to figuring out if there is fraud occurring with these subsidies.

People all around the country are asking: Where is the accountability from the Obama administration? They are spending billions of taxpayer dollars. Where is the accountability to make sure that it is being spent properly and not wasted? There is no accountability because the Obama administration does not seem to care about protecting taxpayer money. It cares more about getting a large number of people enrolled in insurance. That is what they want, no matter what the law says, no matter how much money they waste to do it.

This report from the Government Accountability Office came out last Wednesday. The very next day, there was more bad news for taxpayers because of the health care law. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, February 25, under the headline ``Insurance Fight Escalates.'' It goes on to say: ``Health co-op leaders say the effort to recoup Federal loans will come up short.''

This is taxpayer money. Remember, the health care law gave out billions of dollars--billions of dollars in loans to set up these health insurance co-ops across the country. They set up 23. Already, more than half of them have collapsed and have gone out of business, 12 out of 23 have gone bust, and 700,000 Americans lost their insurance because these co-ops failed.

Now it looks as if hard-working taxpayers are going to lose the money that the government loaned to these failed insurance businesses. According to this Wall Street Journal article, leaders of the co-ops say that taxpayers are going to lose more than $1 billion in the failed co-ops. They say it is because most of the money has already been spent.

The article quotes the head of the co-op in New Mexico as saying: ``Will there be any money left?''

``Yeah, maybe.'' That is what he said. That is his answer: ``Yeah, maybe.'' Maybe there will be a little money left out of more than $1 billion in taxpayer loans. It is outrageous. It was not supposed to be a bailout of the insurance company. These were supposed to be loans.

Is that how the administration thinks loans are supposed to work? Does the Obama administration think that if they lend out money and people borrow it from the taxpayers and spend it, then they don't have to pay it? Where is the accountability from these co-ops for the American people? Where is the accountability for the Obama administration to make sure that they loan this money responsibly and don't waste it? Reports like this paint a very bad picture of health care and the health care law in this country.

We talked about these 23 co-ops and half of them have failed. This was headlined yesterday: ``Losses deepen for remaining ObamaCare co- ops.''

Losses snowballed in the fourth quarter at four co-op health plans [that have now reported their numbers for 2015].

The article says:

The nonprofit startups based in Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio and Maine lost about $270 million last year. . . . That's more than five times the level of losses those plans recorded in 2014.

That was the first year they operated. They are still waiting for the updated financial reports on the other seven remaining co-ops that have not yet posted their returns.

Here we are. Six years ago, there was a debate in Congress about the Americans' health care system. Everyone in this body agreed we had a problem. Everybody agreed we needed to do something to help Americans. Republicans presented our ideas on the floor of the Senate. We went to meetings at the White House. We offered President Obama solutions. Democrats and the President rejected our ideas, and they came up with their own massive plan.

Washington took on too much power over the health care decisions of American families. More Washington control, less Washington accountability--they are never the right answers for our country. If Washington can't protect taxpayer dollars, it shouldn't be collecting so many of these dollars in the first place.

Republicans warned that ObamaCare would be bad for patients, bad for providers, and terrible for the taxpayers. The news keeps coming out, showing that we were exactly right. Republicans are going to continue to talk about our health care ideas and will continue to talk about ideas that will actually hold Washington accountable as Washington spends taxpayers' dollars. We will continue to talk about ideas such as giving families more control over their health care and their health care decisions and giving Washington less control. That is what Americans want.

This new report out from the National Public Radio poll showed 26 percent of Americans say that the health care law, ObamaCare, has directly hurt them. They didn't want this kind of health care reform that directly hurts them, instead of helping them; they wanted to be helped. They don't want an approach like we have; they want an approach that gives them control and, certainly, not a passive approach to preventing fraud. The American people do not want ObamaCare.

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