WASHINGTON – Days after House Republicans released their proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) spoke on the floor of the U.S. Senate about Congressional Republicans’ dangerous attempt to quickly force TrumpCare through Congress without sufficient hearings, amendments, or debate. 

 

As a member of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, Murphy has repeatedly called on Congressional Republicans to stop their crusade to repeal the ACA and to work in a bipartisan way to improve the law.

 

Highlights of Murphy’s speech are below:

 

“We're on a schedule, according to the Majority Leader, that's going to bring a health care bill that will rewrite the rules for one-sixth of the American economy to the floor of the Senate without any debate in the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee. Without a single hearing on the bill, without a markup, without any ability for amendment.

 

“I listened for six years to my Republican friends tell me that the health care bill, the Affordable Care Act, was rammed through Congress, and that the biggest problem was the fact that it was done outside of the public view for expediency sake.

 

“Now, I was there in the House of Representatives. And let me express to you the unbelievable irony of those complaints now that there will be no process for the Committees to consider the replacement to the Affordable Care Act. The House and the Senate had hundreds, hundreds of meetings and hearings. The HELP Committee alone, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but considered hundreds of amendments, adopted over a hundred Republican amendments in the markup process. The Senate session was the second longest in the history of the Senate. In for more than 20 days debating that bill.

 

“The reason that there was so much tempest out in the American public over the Affordable Care Act was because it was open for debate for so long. The Finance Committee had a full process, the HELP Committee had a full process, the Ways and Means Committee had a full process, the Energy and Commerce Committee had a full process. None of that is happening here.

 

“This bill is being jammed through as we speak the Ways and Means, and the Energy, and Commerce Committees. This bill is going to be jammed onto the floor, perhaps without any Committee process in the Senate. The target is from introduction Monday to passage in the House, of three weeks and perhaps just a few more weeks before it passes the Senate. So spare me the complaints about the Affordable Care Act being rushed into place when this process is going to make that look laborious in comparison.

 

“It doesn't have to happen this way. What pains me is a Committee process that when I got here had a reputation for being truly bipartisan, for being one of the more functional, if not the most functional Committee process. And that is being blown up most significantly by the rush job – the rush job on the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act that no one in the American public is going to have enough time to look at and see.”

 

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