Continuing Appropriations Act, 20201 and Other Extensions Act--
Floor Speech
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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, Wendy is a constituent of mine from Stanford, CT, and she tells a story that is going to sound incredibly familiar to folks who have been part of this healthcare debate over the last 10 years in this Chamber. She said:
When my daughter was 15, she was diagnosed with a type of bone cancer and underwent a year of treatment. We were hopeful that she was cured, but exactly 1 year ago--it was 2 months after she graduated from college and was about to move across the country to begin her career when she underwent a routine checkup and found out that the cancer had returned. The past year has included more chemo, surgery, and immunotherapy.
My daughter is now 23 years old, and she is the definition of a preexisting condition. She is still on our health plan, but we are already looking at the time in about 2 years when that will no longer be possible. Although she is at least feeling well enough to begin the job search again, there is no security for any of us without the existence of the Affordable Care Act as an option should she not have employer-based healthcare. She is a young woman who has already gone through so much in these short years. There are enough unknowns. Please continue--
This is her writing to me-- to protect the Affordable Care Act so she knows she has healthcare.
President Trump last night contested the idea that 100 million Americans have preexisting conditions. Well, maybe he is right because most data suggests that the number is 130 million Americans who have some form of preexisting condition that, if insurance companies were allowed to, would either result in rate hikes for them because of their diagnosis, or insurance would be made unavailable to them entirely.
Now, it has almost been 10 years since we lived in a world where insurance companies could deny you healthcare because of a preexisting condition or could raise your rate simply because you are a woman. So for many Americans, it is even hard to remember those days in which you could be discriminated against just because of a childhood cancer. But those days are about to come back. We are literally months away, if President Trump is successful in ramming through this Supreme Court nominee, from insurance companies once again being able to deny coverage to anybody they want based upon their gender, based upon their medical history, based upon their prior diagnosis.
This isn't hyperbole because I have been in the Congress long enough to know two things. One, Republicans will stop at nothing in order to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and we will talk this afternoon about what that means beyond the 130 million Americans who will have their rates increased. But I know something else as well, which is that there is no replacement. There is nothing coming from the Republican majority in the Senate or from this administration to replace the Affordable Care Act. Do you know why I know that? Because I have been waiting for the replacement for a decade, and it has never shown up because it never will.
Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act here the first year of the President's term. A lot of people said it was a foregone conclusion--of course, after having pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act for 5 years, Republicans now, with control of the Senate and the House and the White House, will of course make good on their promise. Of course, we know how that turned out. They couldn't because the American people rose up. Phone lines lit up, townhall meetings exploded, and Republicans in the end could not find the votes, even with majorities in both Houses and control of the White House, to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Well, then, Republicans said, let's find another way. If we can't use the most democratic process--legislation--in order to repeal the Affordable Care Act, then let's go to the courts.
So Republican attorneys general filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the entirety of the Affordable Care Act on a legal premise that most mainstream scholars thought had no shot, but they weren't counting on this President being able to pack the Court with enough extreme, rightwing jurists to accept the flawed argument. So the President started by putting Neil Gorsuch on the Court. He continued with Brett Kavanaugh. Now, one vote away from being able to overturn the Affordable Care Act, he now has a chance, with the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, to finally get what he couldn't get done in the elected branch of American government--the full repeal and elimination of the Affordable Care Act with nothing to replace it.
It is not hyperbole because there is literally that case that I described getting ready for argument before the Supreme Court a week after election day. So guess why it is so important that we confirm a Justice before election day--because they need the votes to invalidate the Affordable Care Act shortly after the election occurs, and it becomes a little bit harder if that Justice is not there to hear the arguments in mid-November.
Take Republicans at their word: They want the Affordable Care Act gone. Take Republicans at their word: They don't have a replacement.
It will be a humanitarian catastrophe in this country, in the middle of a pandemic--a pandemic that is killing 1,000 people a day; 44,000 new infections that we know of on a daily basis--if 23 million Americans lose access to insurance.
Remember, this lawsuit doesn't ask for the Affordable Care Act to be eliminated in pieces or over time; the remedy it seeks is the Affordable Care Act gone, all of it, overnight. There are 23 million Americans who rely on that and 260,000 in my State--the equivalent of 62 different towns in my State alone losing their health insurance.
Don't think that States are going to be able to pick up the pieces here. A lot of these folks are on Medicaid. Theoretically, States could decide to pick up the bill themselves, but they can't because the President has forced States to foot the lion's share of the bill for fighting COVID because of the failure to stand up a national response. So States have no money lying around in order to make up for all the people who are going to lose Medicaid access. There are 23 million people who can lose their insurance, potentially by the end of the year or early next year, if this Justice gets confirmed to the Court.
But then, all those people with preexisting conditions--and, remember, we now have a new preexisting condition. That is COVID. What we are learning about COVID-19 is very, very worrying. Researchers have observed changes to the heart, the vascular system, the lungs, the brain, the kidneys in those who have gotten sick, and even in many people who are asymptomatic. In fact, there is a study out there right now that Dr. Fauci noted before the HELP Committee recently that shows 70 to 80 percent of people who have had COVID have some lasting damage to their heart. COVID is a preexisting condition.
Now, you may think, I haven't had COVID, so I am not at risk of that preexisting condition causing my rates to go up if Amy Coney Barrett gets confirmed to the Court. Well, you don't know if you have had COVID or not, and let me tell you that insurance companies are not going to play dumb. If they are allowed to discriminate against you because you have COVID, then they are going to require you to prove that you haven't had it before you get a policy. Millions and millions of Americans are going to have their rates increased or be denied healthcare at all because they had COVID, whether they were asymptomatic or symptomatic. That, in and of itself, is a healthcare crisis in this country.
So the stakes of this debate over the nomination of this new Supreme Court Justice couldn't be higher. Senator Klobuchar talked about the fact that this Supreme Court may decide the outcome of this election, and that is a subject that we should explore at a different time. But 1 week after the election, the Court will hear a case asking for the invalidation of the entire Affordable Care Act. Republicans in the Senate and the White House have no plan to replace it, and if that case is successful, 23 million people are at risk of losing their health insurance: 11 million who are on the exchanges; 12 million who are covered by Medicaid; 133 million Americans, roughly half of America's population under the age of 65, could have their rates increase because of preexisting conditions; 2 million young people under the age of 26 could be kicked off their parents' health insurance; and 9 million people who receive Federal subsidies, tax credits, to buy private insurance would lose that coverage.
In the midst of a global pandemic, a COVID diagnosis would possibly render you ineligible for insurance. That is a nightmare--a nightmare on top of the pandemic nightmare that we are living through currently.
So we are on the floor today to make sure that our Senate Republican colleagues don't distract the American public, don't try to create controversies around this nomination that don't exist, and don't try to put words in Democrats' mouths. Listen to what we are saying. What we are saying is that this nomination is about the future of the American healthcare system, and every single Senator who votes to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, I believe, is voting to take insurance away from over 20 million Americans, voting to render COVID a preexisting condition that requires you to pay more for healthcare for the rest of your life, and going back to the days in which any preexisting condition could cause you to lose your health insurance and then lose everything that you have saved up over decades and decades.
Betty Burger is one of those people, and I will finish with her story. Betty Burger had good insurance through her husband her entire life. He changed jobs, and he had about a week's period of time in which he didn't have a job in between those two jobs and did not have healthcare. During that week, one of their kids was diagnosed with cancer, and it became a preexisting condition, such that the husband's employer's healthcare plan wouldn't cover it, and the Burgers lost everything--everything. They went bankrupt. They went through their savings. They went through the college fund. They lost their house. They lost everything.
It has been a decade since any American has had to face that kind of financial ruin because of a diagnosis for them or their child. It is hard for us to remember those days, but they are coming back. They are coming back--I tell you this now--if this Supreme Court Justice is rammed through over the course of the next month.
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