A Second Opinion

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Mr. BARRASSO. Madam President, I come to the floor again today, as I have week after week since the health care law has been passed, with a doctor's second opinion about the health care law. As you know, I have practiced medicine for 25 years in Wyoming, taking care of Wyoming families.

I have great concerns about this health care law that has been passed by this body as well as the House, signed by the President. The American people continue to learn more and more about this health care law, and the more they learn, the more concern they have about this law being bad for patients; bad for providers, the nurses and doctors who take care of the patients; and bad for the payers, the taxpayers of this country who are going to get hit with an incredible bill.

The main subject I wish to talk about today is a new report that has come out that says to me that the taxpayers are going to get hit with a bill much higher than they initially thought. It is a report from the McKinsey Quarterly called ``How U.S. health care reform will affect employee benefits.''

In the debate and speeches the President had given in the runup to the election and the vote on this bill, he said that if you had care you liked, you could keep it; that the American people, if they had a plan they liked, would be able to keep it. It was a promise he made to the American people, a promise the American people wanted to believe. But now this report shows that the American people were right in being skeptical, and, as we see, the more the American people learn about the health care law, the less they like it and the more they oppose it.

What this report says is that a shift away from employer-provided health insurance will be vastly greater than expected and will make sense for many companies and lower income workers alike.

When we work our way through this report, what we see is that more and more private companies that today--today--provide health insurance for their employees will be much less likely to be willing to provide that insurance in the future. Why? Because it is going to be a lot more expensive to provide the insurance. The mandates, the quality, and the high level of expense involved with providing that insurance is going to be a significant burden to those companies. And if they don't provide the insurance at all, there are going to be other chances for those employees and it will actually be cheaper for the business to not provide insurance, give the people a raise, and pay the penalty of the health care law and leave people without the insurance.

When we take a look at this overall health care law, we see it as one where this body and this President raided Medicare. They took $500 billion away from our seniors on Medicare, not to save Medicare but to start a whole new government program. With the President's Payment Advisory Board, he additionally wants to ration Medicare--ration Medicare. They have raided Medicare and rationed Medicare. Is it any surprise that people on Medicare are having a much harder time finding a doctor as doctors refuse to see patients on Medicare?

So with all of this, now we get this report. This report says--and this is a very reputable national consulting firm. This report says they did a survey of 1,300 employers across the country--different industries, different geographies, different employer sizes--and the results ought to be a huge wakeup call for all workers and all families across the country, because what this group has seen from this study is that overall, 30 percent of all employers--30 percent of all employers--will either definitely or probably--so likely--stop offering employer-sponsored health coverage in the years after 2014. That is when ObamaCare goes fully into effect.

Among employers with a high awareness of how the program actually works for health care reform--who have actually studied what the law says--in that group, those who are most well informed, they are saying more than 50 percent and upwards to 60 percent will pursue other options. They will likely stop offering their employees health coverage. At least 30 percent of the employers would gain economically from dropping coverage even if they completely compensated the employees for the change of losing their insurance. This is very alarming for our country.

There was a well-written editorial in yesterday's Wall Street Journal by Grace-Marie Turner, and I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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Mr. BARRASSO. Grace-Marie Turner is president of the Galen Institute and coauthor of a book called ``Why ObamaCare Is Wrong For America.'' Having read the book, I will tell my colleagues a lot of the things I have been talking about during the debate leading up to the vote on ObamaCare and that I have been talking about afterwards as a doctor's second opinion are included in her book. She specifically writes that no, you can't keep your health insurance. There are about 150 million Americans who get their coverage at work. We are not talking about people on Medicare; we are talking about nonelderly Americans who get their coverage at work.

The Congressional Budget Office, when we were debating the health care law, estimated that maybe 9 million, 10 million of those people, or about 7 percent of the employees who currently get their health insurance through work, may lose their health insurance at work, in spite of the fact that the President said if you like what you have, you can keep it. But this survey of 1,300 different companies--organizations that provide health insurance--30 percent of them say I don't think we are going to follow that route. We are talking about a significantly larger number than the Congressional Budget Office had even anticipated. The numbers are astonishing.

In a study last year, Doug Holtz-Eakin, who is the former director of the Congressional Budget Office, estimated not what the current CBO said--maybe 10 million--he thought maybe 35 million workers would be moved out of employer-covered plans into subsidized coverage, paid for by the taxpayers, and he thought by getting to that number, it would add an additional $1 trillion to the estimate of what the real costs were going to be for the President's health care law. If these numbers are true, this newer, higher number of 30 percent pulling out--and maybe 50 percent once they find out what is actually in the law, in the mandates on these businesses--the additional costs, at a time when we are looking at 9.1 percent unemployment in this country, are going to go even higher with the significant subsidies that exist for families making up to $88,000 a year.

So I come to the floor to say that the more we learn about this health care law, the more unintended consequences we find; that many of the predictions made about this health care law from this side of the aisle are now coming true.

I have spoken in the past about waivers. We now are at a point where 3 million people who get their health insurance through work--3 million people covered with health insurance in this country--have gotten waivers. Whole
States have gotten waivers so they don't have to live under the mandates of the health care law, and they are going to be back for waivers again next year and the year after that.

We see additional concern with what is in this health care law. As Nancy Pelosi said, first you have to pass it before you get to find out what is in it. As more and more people find out what is in it, we are finding that more and more people who maybe had coverage they liked are not going to be able to keep that coverage and are going to lose that coverage, and the taxpayers are going to get stuck footing the bill.

That is why I come back to the floor week after week with a doctor's second opinion, because there is new information that comes out week after week, as this McKinsey & Company study and report came out this week. That is why I continue to say we need to repeal and replace this terribly broken health care law.

Thank you.

With that, I yield the floor.

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