{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.alexander.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases?ContentRecord_id=767237c4-feb1-4f99-b8e0-3227e46c555c", "Alexander Calls On President to Sign Legislation to Fix Damage Caused By Obamacare", "2015-12-04", "2015", "2015-12", "Republican", "House", "TN", "Lamar Alexander", "A000360", "www.alexander.senate.gov", null, null, "legacy", "WASHINGTON, December 3 The chairman of the Senate health committee today called on President Obama to sign legislation to fix damage caused by Obamacare and work with Republicans step by step to create a system where millions more Americans will have access to their choice of health plans that fit their needs and fit their budgets after the Senate voted to pass legislation to repeal Obamacare.\r\nSix years ago, Republicans warned the president about the disastrous consequences of Obamacare for millions of Americans, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said. Unfortunately for these Americans, Republicans were right when we said that Obamacare would burden state Medicaid budgets, increase premiums and taxes, and hurt jobs. We need to start over and go step by step toward the goal of reducing health care costs.\r\nAlexander continued: I renew our invitation to the president, and if he doesnt accept our invitation, I extend it to our next president: Forget about party, forget about this side or that side, and side with the American people whose premiums went up, who lost plans they liked, whose Medicare has been raided, whose state budgets have been destroyed, and whose jobs have been lost. Work with Republicans in Congress to fix the damage Obamacare has done to health care in America. Work with us to replace Obamacare with real reforms that lower costs so more Americans can afford to buy insurance.\r\nSome of the proposals in the legislation include:\r\n Repealing Medicaid expansion and Obamacares new entitlement spending after a two year transition period\r\n Repealing the individual mandate and the employer mandate\r\n Repealing most of Obamacares 21 tax increases including the health benefits tax, the medical device tax, and the prescription drug tax\r\n Putting the savings from repealing Obamacare back into the Medicare Trust Fund which was raided by Obamacare\r\nThe full text of Senator Alexanders floor speech from Tuesday afternoon as the Senate began debate on the legislation:\r\nLet me take you back five and a half years ago to February 25, 2010, and the White House health care summit at Blair House. This is the same scene where Arthur Vandenburg met privately with George Marshall to discuss the reconstruction plan for Europe that became the Marshall plan  and the perfect setting to have a serious, bipartisan discussion about how to improve health care for millions of Americans.\r\nThirty-six members of members of Congress attended the summit to discuss the health care bill passed by Democrats  whats now known as Obamacare. We stayed there all day. It was televised continuously. Both then-Minority Leader Boehner and then-Minority Leader McConnell asked me to lead in speaking on behalf of Republicans.\r\nI said to the President that day that I was there not only to represent the views of all Republicansbut as a former governor that I would like to try to represent the views of governors as well  because they had a big stake in this. I said too that I was at the summit to represent the views of a great number of the American people who have tried to say in every way they know how  through town meetings, through surveys, through elections in Virginia and New Jersey and Massachusetts, that they oppose the health care bill that passed the Senate on Christmas Eve.\r\nI warned the president that day about the unfortunate consequences of Obamacare for millions of Americans. I told the president that Obamacare would send an unfunded Medicaid mandate to states. I said, It will cut Medicare by about half a trillion dollars and spend most of that on new programs ... It means there will be about a half trillion dollars of new taxes in it.It means that for millions of Americans, premiums will go up, because when people pay those new taxes, premiums will go up, and they will also go up because of the government mandates.\r\nI said directly to the President that instead of this partisan planpassed without the support of a single Republican in the Senatethat we Republicans were prepared to work with him to reform health care. I said to the president, We need to start over and go step by step toward the goal of reducing health care costs. I said this means working together the way General Marshall and Senator Vandenberg did....And it means going step by step together to re-earn the trust of the American people.\r\nThe President and congressional Democrats did not take my advice that day at Blair House  and hardly any of the advice of my Republican colleagues, for that matter  about what the disastrous outcomes of Obamacare would be  and more than five years after the law was passed and nearly two years into its implementation, we can say one thing without question: The unfortunate reality for the American people struggling with Obamacare is that Republicans were right. Obamacare was an historic mistake.\r\nRepublicans agreed with the president and his party that our health care system was broken and needed to be fixed. But we argued the president was moving in exactly the wrong direction to fix it.\r\nWhat Obamacare did was expand a broken system everybody already knew was too expensive. Republicans said so at that February 2010 summit, and the facts today show we were right.\r\nLets take a closer look at what Republicans predicted six years ago  and what unfortunately came true.\r\nLets also take a look at what Democrats predicted back thenor better put: what they promisedand which of their predictions and promises came true.\r\nLets go through them one by one.\r\nFirst: Medicaid.\r\nDuring my opening speech at Blair House, I said, Nothing used to make me madder as a governor than when Washington politicians would get together, pass a bill, take credit for it, and send me the bill to pay. Thats exactly what this does, with the expansion of Medicaid. In addition, it dumps 15 to 18 million low-income Americans into a Medicaid program that none of us want to be a part of, because 50 percent of doctors won't see new patients.So its like giving someone a ticket to a bus line where the buses only run half the time.\r\nMedicaid had already always been one of the federal governments biggest unfunded mandates on statesand expanding that mandate would only wreak more havoc on state budgets that, especially at the time, during the height of the recession, were already struggling. Former Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesena Democratsaid the proposed Medicaid expansion under Obamacare would represent the mother of all unfunded mandates.\r\nWhen I was governor, Medicaid only made up about 8 percent of Tennessees state budget. By last year, it was 30.6 percent. States paying more and more to expand Medicaid means less to spend on other priorities like higher education, roads, and law enforcement. In 2012, I said that over the prior ten years, Tennessees Medicaid costs had gone up 43 percent, forcing the state to decrease its funding to colleges and universities by 11 percent. As a result, tuition went up 120 percent over those ten years.\r\nAccording to the Congressional Budget Office, the law adds 14 million new beneficiaries to struggling state Medicaid programs by 2025at an extra cost of $46 billion to states and $847 billion to federal taxpayers by 2025.\r\nAnd why is that so bad? I said at the time and its still true todayMedicaids reimbursement rates are so low that only about half of doctors will even see Medicaid patients and many of those arent accepting new ones. Its not hard to see why expanding a failed program isnt good for Americans.\r\nAnd another thing to consider is that states still haven't yet had to pay for covering new Medicaid enrollees under the expansion. The federal government promised to pay 100 percent for the first few years. But starting in 2017, states will have to start paying 5 percent, and eventually up to ten percent by 2020.\r\nThat may not seem like very much in Washington terms, but it can mean a lot to states. States may have to start raising income taxes or gas taxesor find some other way to find the moneybut regardless of how its paid for, expanding Medicaid puts a huge dent in state budgets. Does that mean less money for teachers salaries? Does that mean tuition is going to have to be higher at community colleges and state universities?\r\nTennessee hasnt expanded Medicaid, but in its proposal to expand the program called Insure Tennessee, Governor Haslam anticipated an additional $35.6 million in costs to the state in 2017.\r\nIn Illinois, Medicaid expansion will cost the state $208.6 million in 2020  according to projections from Gov. Bruce Rauners administration.\r\nAnother example is Kentucky. Under Kentuckys expansion, the state will have to pay $74 million in 2017 and an estimated $363 million in 2021. Governor-elect Bevin hasnt started looking for ways to pay for that huge increase because he plans to repeal the states expansion, and if you look at the figures, you may begin to understand why he may be considering a repealrather than raising taxes on Kentuckians.\r\nSo we were right about Obamacares enormous impact on Medicaid and in turn Medicaids huge, negative effect on state budgets.\r\nSecond: higher premiums.\r\nWhen my turn came at the White House summit, I said directly the president that the Congressional Budget office report says that premiums will rise in the individual market as a result of Obamacare.\r\nThe president said I was wrong about that.\r\nA little bit later that day, I gave the president a letter showing that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had, in fact, said in a letter to then-Senator Bayh, also a Democrat, that CBO and [the Joint Committee on Taxation] estimate that the average premium per person covered (including dependents) for new nongroup policies would be about 10 percent to 13 percent higher in 2016 than the average for nongroup coverage in that same year under current law.\r\nIn that same letter, I reminded the president that his own chief actuary for the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services agreed with the CBO, saying that the fees in the presidents proposed law would generally be passed through to health consumers in the form of higher drug and device prices and higher insurance premiums.\r\nYou might be thinking the law turned out better than the Congressional Budget Office, the Joint Committee on Taxation, and the chief actuary for CMS predicted, and that health insurance premiums went down, not up.\r\nBut sadly, thats not the case. We were right about Obamacares higher premiums for Americans with individual health care plans:\r\nWere talking about 15.6 million Americans who purchase these plans. These are policies that individual Americans buy for themselves. Again, 15.6 million Americans  and the cost of these plans is going through the roof.\r\nOn June 1 of this year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that nearly 700 individual and small group health plans in 41 states plus the District of Columbia requested double-digit premium increases for 2016. In my home state, after already seeing some of the largest premium increases in the country in 2015, Tennesseans will now face a rate hike in 2016 of more than 36 percent for the states most popular health insurance plan.\r\nIn Maryland, the largest insurance provider in the state will increase premium rates by up to 26 percent for Preferred Provider Organization (PPO) subscribers, and nearly 20 percent for Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) subscribers.\r\nOn average, 2016 premium increases for Oregons biggest insurer on the states health exchange will be over 25 percent, and for some smaller providers the increase will be over 30 percent.\r\nIn 2016, South Dakotans will pay as much as 63 percent more for health insurance through the exchange.\r\nThe list of states experiencing health premium spikes goes on.\r\nA recent report by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that in 2014, individual health insurance market premiums grew by 24.4 percent on average compared to what they would have been without Obamacare.\r\nAnd going back to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that predicted back in 2010 that the proposed law would increase premiums: The CBO recently predicted that the premiums on the Obamacare exchange will increase by 6 percent, on average, every year between 2016 and 2024.\r\nAnd yet, five and a half years ago, the president and congressional Democrats told Republicans time and time again during the debate that we were wrong, that their law would decrease premiums  when in fact, our predictions, the administrations own estimates, estimates from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the nonpartisan CBO all confirm premiums are going through the roof.\r\nThird, Republicans said Obamacare would increase taxes.\r\nObamacare added 21 tax increases to the tax code, totaling over a trillion dollars over ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Officea dozen of whichtarget middle-income Americans, in clear violation of the Presidents pledge to avoid tax hikes on these individuals and families.\r\nOur fourth prediction also came true: We said Obamacare would cost jobs.\r\nSome time ago I met with a large group of chief executive officers of restaurant companies in America. The service and hospitality industries are the largest employers in America. Restaurant companies are the largest employer of low-income, young, usually minority people.\r\nIn that meeting, the chief executive officer of Ruby Tuesday, Incorporated, which has about 800 restaurants, said to me -- and he didn't mind being quoted -- that the cost to his company of implementing the new health care law would equal his entire profit for the company last year and that he wouldn't build anymore new restaurants in the United States as a result of that.\r\nAnother, even larger restaurant company, said because of their analysis of the law, instead of operating their stores with 90 employees, they would try to offer it through stores with 70 employees. So that means fewer employees, and it means fewer employees receiving employer health care.\r\nMore recently, another family franchise business  which employs 550 people and operates under the name of a well-known brandtold me we have already begun cutting the hours of our employees to get well below the 30 hour thresh hold, and all of our new job postings are for part time positions only.Adjusting the hours of our current employees has had a dramatic impact on the employee employer relationship, causing the loss of other fringe benefits such as loss [or] reduction of vacation eligibility, reduction [or] elimination of discretionary bonus programs, and an increase in the loss of eligibility [and] participation in 401(k) retirement programs. These are all unintended consequences of the decisions employers have had to make due to themandate.  Without a change in the law, the costs of health care will exceed our net profit, regardless of whether we cover our employees or pay the penalty, and small businesses cannot absorb these costs.\r\nThese are just a few examples of whats basic economics.\r\nIf you heap costs on employers, they have less money to expand, less money to hire more American workers. You heap even higher costs on employers, employers might need to cut employees hours to pay those costs. You heap still higher costs on employers, they might need to lay off employees.\r\nWeve seen all three as a result of the employer mandate that says employers with more than 50 full-time employees need to provide health insurance. Whats more: Obamacare went a step further and for the first time in our history defined full time as more than 30 hours a week, increasing the number of employees subject to Obamacares employer mandate.\r\nWhat followed, anyone could have predictedand Republicans did so all throughout the debate.\r\nBecause providing health care costs a lot of money, employers started to decrease their employees hours from 35 or 40 to 29 or fewer in order to decrease their number of full-time employees subject to Obamacare.\r\nThey didnt do this for ideological or political reasons. These employers are running businesses, not trying to make a political point.\r\nIf what an employer takes in doesnt exceed what the employer expends, the businesses wont last long. And in whats been a struggling economy since the 2008 crash in no small part because of the presidents failed economic policies, many employers have struggled to deal with the added costs Obamacare imposed on their businesses.\r\nThe Congressional Budget Office has projected that Obamacare will result in 2 million fewer full-time jobs in 2017 and 2.5 million fewer full-time jobs by 2024. At least 450 employers across the nation, including 100 school districts, have said Obamacare forced them to cut positions or reduce worker hours. The National Federation of Independent Business estimates that Obamacares $100 billion tax on health insurance will eliminate between 152,000 and 286,000 private sector jobs between 2014 and 2023.\r\nNow, weve been over what Republicans said would happen years agothat Medicaid would destroy state budgets, that premiums and taxes would go up, and that jobs would be lost.\r\nThis has all, unfortunately, come true.\r\nLets now look at what the president and congressional Democrats promised about their own law. Were they right or wrong?\r\nThe most famous, or infamous, promise, which Politifact named the 2013 Lie of the Year, was the presidents: If you like your plan, you can keep it.\r\nMillions of Americans learned very quickly when Obamacare was fully implemented in 2014 that they wouldnt be able to keep the plans they liked.\r\nIn October 2013, I received a letter from a woman, Emilie, who lives in Middle Tennessee who was one of 16,000 Tennesseans who is part of another plan called CoverTN. She is losing her policy.\r\nThe letter reads:\r\nI am 39 year old single woman with a chronic illness, Lupus. I worked my way through college. \r\nAs a person with a chronic illness that was deemed uninsurable, the only way I was able to obtain health insurance was through an employer based program called CoverTN...Although some call it a minimal coverage plan, it has been stellar AND affordable...I was excited to hear about the Affordable Health Care Act. I was glad to hear that \"uninsurables\" could no longer be denied coverage...unfortunately [that] is NOT TRUE.\r\nI cannot keep my current plan because it does not meet the standards of coverage. This alone is a travesty. CoverTN has been a lifeline.\r\nWith the discontinuation of CoverTN, I am being forced to purchase a plan...that will increase [my costs] by a staggering 410%. My out of pocket expense will increase by more than $6,000.00 a year. Please help me understand how this is affordable.\r\nI beg of you to continue the fight for those, like me, who would only ask to be allowed to continue to have what we already enjoy. A fair health insurance plan at a fair price.\r\nThat is from Emilie, and we could spend all day telling stories of Americans who liked their health care plans but werent able to keep them under Obamacare. In November 2013, it looked as if nearly 5 million Americans in 32 states were going to lose their coverage beginning in January 2014. The administration then made a series of last-minute, regulatory fixes in 2013 and 2014  but many Americans  like Emilie  still lost their plans and were forced to go shopping for something else.\r\nThe president also said: Medicare is a government program. But dont worry: Im not going to touch it.\r\nThe problem with that statement is: He touched Medicare in a big, big way. His health care law raids $700 billion from Medicare in order to finance Obamacare.\r\nDuring debate over Obamacare in 2009, I said Obamacare would cut grandma's Medicare to spend on somebody other than grandma -- a new entitlement program. Obamacare, I said, would do that at a time when the Medicare Program  is going broke. ... The Medicare trustees -- it is their job to watch out for these things -- said: We need timely and effective action to address Medicare financial challenges. I think what they are saying to us is if you are going to cut grandma's Medicare, you ought to at least spend it on grandma instead of spending it on somebody else. End quote.\r\nAgain, the president went against the promise he repeated over and over again and raided a program that serves more than 55 million older Americans.\r\nIn summary, unfortunately, Republicans were right when we said that Obamacare would force spikes in state Medicaid spending, increase premiums and taxes, and hurt jobs.\r\nAnd as right as Republicans were about how bad Obamacare would be for the American people, Democrats were equally as wrong about what they said throughout the debate that their law would allow Americans to keep the health plans they liked and that Medicare wouldnt be affected.\r\nAnd finally, an important point about how none of this had to happen. We all agreed the health care system needed to be fixed. So how did we end up with a law that has only made things worse?\r\nWell, one big reason is: the debate over Obamacare in the Senate wasnt really a debate. If it had been, we might not find ourselves in this mess today.\r\nThen-Majority Leader Harry Reid had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and seemed to think that meant Republicans didnt have any ideas worth considering.Rather than to listen to Republicans, or to the majority of Americans who opposed the directionPresident Obama and the Democratic majority were planning to take our health care system,theywrote their bill behind closed doors and on Christmas Eve unveiled a bill filled to the brim with items from each Democratic members wish list.\r\nAlong with our warnings throughout the Obamacare debate, we offered plenty of thoughtful ideas to fix our health care system in a way that would lower costs and expand access while making sure patients didnt lose control over their own health care.\r\nBut Democrats also had a majority in the House, as well as a president in the White House who also didnt think he had to listen to, let alone work with, Republicans in Congress who were also elected to represent their constituents.\r\nOur predictions, which turned out to be true, and our ideas, which would have worked, unfortunately for the American people all fell on deaf ears.\r\nNow Ive spent enough time saying We told you so.\r\nWhat next? What do Republicans offer the American people?\r\nIf Republicans were right about Obamacare being an historic mistake, Id like to say we were also right about what we should have done instead to fix our broken health care system. And we should be trusted to fix the mess Obamacare has left us.\r\nThroughout the Obamacare debate, Leader McConnell, who was the minority leader at the time, was criticized for not coming up with a comprehensive plan of his own. We told the president and congressional Democrats not to hold their breath for Leader McConnell to roll a wheelbarrow onto the Senate floor with a twenty-seven-hundred-page bill of his own, because thats not how Republicans believed we could best fix the problems with our health care system.\r\nWe suggested a step-by-step approach to address each of the problems our health care system faced.\r\nThose waiting for Leader McConnell to do so now, to roll onto the Senate floor a wheelbarrow with a bill thousands of pages long to replace Obamacare, are again advised not to hold their breath.\r\nIf Democrats are saying that Republicans dont have a twenty-seven-hundred-page plan that increases premiums, decreases choice of doctors, hurts jobs, and raids Medicare to pay for a new entitlement, theyre exactly right.\r\nThats because Americans have been loud and clear that they dont want that.\r\nThe wisest course is to repeal Obamacare and replace it step by step with solutions that lower health care costs.\r\nThis approach to health reform is not something that Republicans cooked up yesterday or the day before. In fact, if you will examine theCongressional Recordyou will find Republican senators proposed a step-by-step approach to confronting our nations health care and other challenges 173 different times on the floor of the Senate during 2009.\r\nI hope the president will listen to us and work with us on some of the ideas we presented to the American people at Blair House six years ago and the ideas that we continue to offer to take us step by step in a different direction -- one that emphasizes more freedom, more choices, and lower costs:\r\nWe should allow individuals to buy a health plan in any state that meets their needs. There is no reason to force Americans to purchase federally mandated plans with benefits they dont want and cant afford. Health reform should be about expanding access to lower-cost plans, not increasing the cost of insurance.\r\nWe should reduce junk lawsuits against doctors that only increase costs.\r\nWe should expand Health Savings Accounts and other mechanisms that allow individuals to control how they spend their health care dollars.\r\nWe should return power to the states to regulate their markets and lower costs. States are the laboratories of democracy and need to be given the freedom to develop systems to drive competition, not be subject to one-size-fits-all rules.\r\nWe should allow small businesses to assist employees in purchasing insurance and look at other ways to support employers offering health care benefits to their employees\r\nWe should lower barriers at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) so that innovative drugs and devices can get to patients faster.\r\nWe should put the private sector in charge of health information technology to deliver better data and greater transparency.\r\nWe should ensure that Americans with pre-existing conditions have access to affordable coverage through high-risk pools or other insurance incentives.\r\nAnd there certainly are other ideas we can work on in a bipartisan way to lower costs, increase access, and put patients back in charge of their own health care.\r\nThis week, were talking about repealing Obamacare. But for the last six years weve been talking about a completely different path of providing health care at a lower cost to more Americans. Those steps that Republicans outlined in 2009 and 2010 and 2011 are the same kinds of steps that we should be taking today.\r\nIve been saying since 2009 that the problem with Obamacare was that we deliberately expanded a health care delivery system that already cost too much  instead of moving step by step to create a system where millions more Americans had choices of plans that fit their needs and fit their budgets.\r\nAnd the way we should accomplish this is the same way we passed Medicare, passed Social Security, passed the Civil Rights Act  and in the way we hopefully will pass a broad reauthorization to fix No Child Left Behind. None of this is done by cramming a bill down the throats of the American people with 60 votes in the middle of a snowstorm on Christmas Eve.\r\nI renew our invitation to the president, and if he doesnt accept our invitation, I extend it to our next president: Forget about party, forget about this side or that side, and side with the American people whose premiums went up, who lost plans they liked, whose Medicare has been raided, whose state budgets have been destroyed, and whose jobs have been lost. Work with Republicans in Congress to fix the damage Obamacare has done to health care in America.Work with us to replace Obamacare with real reforms that lower costs so more Americans can afford to buy insurance.\r\n###\r\nFor access to this release and the senators other statements, click here.\r\nTo stay up-to-date on the senators latest actions, follow him on Twitter and YouTube.", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.alexander.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases?ContentRecord_id=767237c4-feb1-4f99-b8e0-3227e46c555c"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 2.025050111114979, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}