WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, on Thursday delivered remarks on the U.S. Senate floor blasting the Trump administration’s ongoing sabotage of the American health care industry, and Senate Republicans’ inaction. During his remarks, Murphy called for a vote next week on legislation offered by U.S. Representative Annie Kuster (NH-2) in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) in the U.S. Senate to protect people with pre-existing conditions. Murphy noted that 130 million Americans living with pre-existing conditions, including 522,000 living in Connecticut, could lose their health care coverage if the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are successful.

“This is the latest assault on people with pre-existing conditions, but it stands in a very long ongoing line of actions by this administration, backed up by Republicans in the Congress, to try to reduce coverage and increase costs for people with pre-existing conditions,” said Murphy.

“As we speak today, the administration is readying to go to court with a whole bunch of Republican Attorneys General to ask the federal judicial system to overturn protections for people with pre-existing conditions. So having failed to get the entirety of the bill repealed through the Congress, the administration now is going to court to try to get the protections for people with pre-existing conditions repealed. And once again this Congress, this Senate is silent on that case,” Murphy added.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that over 1 million more people were uninsured in 2018 than were in 2016. Last year, 18 Republican Attorneys General—led by Texas—sued the federal government, arguing that protections for those with pre-existing conditions in the Affordable Care Act are unconstitutional. The Trump administration took the unprecedented step to side with the partisan lawsuit, threatening health insurance coverage for over 20 million Americans. In December, Murphy blasted the ruling by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, who threw out the Affordable Care Act in its entirety, throwing the American health care system into chaos. U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments in this lawsuit in July.

The full text of Murphy’s remarks is below:

Across America there are 130 million individuals who have a preexisting condition. This means individuals have a diagnosis, an illness, a medical condition that without the Affordable Care Act would likely mean that they were priced out of insurance because the costs associated with their illness are so high that no insurer would provide them coverage, or the cost of insurance are much higher than those who don't have that illness or that condition. These pre-existing conditions don't discriminate. They affect Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, people who watch Fox News, people who watch MSNBC.

This isn't a partisan issue, pre-existing conditions affect everybody. In my state, you know, give or take 522,000 people have pre-existing conditions. And I talk to them every time I go back to Connecticut. I remember two years ago when I was walking across the state, something I do every year. I take about a week in the summer and I walk from one end of the state to the other end. There were families that would find out on social media where I was going to be walking that day and preposition themselves hours ahead of time by the side of the road so that they could tell me about their diagnosis. 

One young woman who was sobbing on the side of the road in Meriden, Connecticut, as she explained to me her lupus diagnosis and how without the Affordable Care Act and the protections that it provides her, she would not have insurance, she would not be able to afford the medications that keep her well and alive, and her life would be ruined. And those individuals are freaking out today because they have watched this president and, frankly, this Republican Congress use every power at their disposal, every tool in their tool kit to try to take away these protections for people that are sick, for people who through no fault of their own just have higher medical bills than the rest of us and don't feel like they should be discriminated against or forsaken by the health insurance marketplace because of their unfortunate diagnosis.

The latest assault on people with pre-existing conditions comes through a effort by the administration to allow states to sell insurance plans that don't cover basic medical needs, plans that would allow for a skimpy set of benefits to be sold out on the insurance marketplaces. Now admittedly, that might be good news for pretty healthy people who don't want to pay for a full insurance product because they think they don't need it. Well, the first problem with that is you're only healthy until you're not healthy. The second bigger problem is that when all the healthy people go to these skimpy plans, sometimes called “junk plans,” and all the people with pre-existing conditions get left behind on the regulated plans where insurance is real, where it covers everything you need, costs go down for the healthy people and they go through the roof for the sick people, which is the entire problem that we were trying to solve for in 2009 and 2010.

And in fact, the problem the Republicans say repeatedly out on the campaign trail and back in their districts and states that they want to solve for it too. I don't know that I've met a Republican senator who doesn't say that they don't think people with pre-existing conditions should be discriminated against, and yet this rule that the administration is proposing is going to allow states to do just that. Allow for a have and have-not insurance system in which people with pre-existing conditions are charged more and people without pre-existing conditions are charged less. 

My intention was to come down to the floor today and offer a unanimous consent request to get us on the road to solving this latest assault on people with pre-existing conditions. And let me explain to you what my request was going to be. I understand that there are Republican objections and that there is not the ability to object today when I make this request, and so I will reserve the right to make that request until early next week. But here is the substance of the request that I was planning to make today. Last week the House of Representatives passed a piece of legislation called the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act, and what this legislation would have done and will do if passed and signed by the president is to prevent H.H.S. from taking any action to implement the administration's waivers for states to set up these junk plans, these skimpy plans. And it's in keeping with the intent of the Affordable Care Act which is to allow flexibility for states. There is an ability under the Affordable Care Act for states to innovate and to flexible, but the Affordable Care Act says you can't do that in a way that hurts consumers. You can't do that in a way that provides less coverage to consumers. And so the rule the Trump administration is proposing in many of our minds is a violation of the Affordable Care Act in and of itself, which is still the law of the land, but this piece of legislation would clarify that you cannot, you cannot allow for the development and widespread sale of these junk insurance plans without dramatically harming the health care of the 130 million Americans who have pre-existing and so my intent was to ask for unanimous consent request to bring this bill for a vote to the Senate. I will do that next week.

But at some point, at some point we have to act like we actually are the United States Senate. It's not enough to just say over and over again that you support people with pre-existing conditions and then do nothing, as the administration launches a daily nonstop, unending, unceasing, relentless effort to destroy health care for people with pre-existing conditions. This is the latest assault on people with pre-existing conditions, but it stands in a very long ongoing line of actions by this administration backed up by Republicans in the Congress to try to reduce coverage and increase costs for people with pre-existing conditions.

It started, of course, with the whole repeal effort which would not have replaced the Affordable Care Act with anything meaningful. The bill that passed the House of Representatives would have stripped health care away from 30 million Americans. The tax bill that included a portion of health care repeal that was passed and signed by the president eliminates health care for 13 million Americans. Many of those have pre-existing conditions. As we speak today, the administration is readying to go to court with a whole bunch of Republican Attorneys General to ask the federal judicial system to overturn protections for people with pre-existing conditions. So having failed to get the entirety of the bill repealed through the Congress, the administration now is going to court to try to get the protections for people with pre-existing conditions repealed. And once again this Congress, this Senate is silent on that case. We've offered another piece of legislation to stop that lawsuit from going forward. We don't have any takers on the Republican side. This assault is real. I didn't make it up. It's not imagined. If this court case succeeds that the Trump administration is pushing, overnight the entirety of the Affordable Care Act will be invalidated and there is no plan for how to replace it. If these junk plans go into effect -- maybe I will be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. Maybe there won't be a flight of people to these skimpy plans.

But much of the analysis I've seen suggests that that will happen. And if it does, there's just no way other than for the costs to go up for everybody left behind on the regulated plans. I don't know about you, but when I talk to my folks living paycheck to paycheck in Connecticut, they don't have a lot of room in their budget for increased premiums for health care. They're maxed out as it is. So I'll stand down for now, but I'll be back here early next week to offer this unanimous consent request. I would hope if my colleagues turn it down, if they don't want to bring up a piece of legislation that would stop this latest regulatory assault on the Affordable Care Act, they would come to the table with other ideas as to how to protect people with pre-existing conditions from this campaign of sabotage by the administration, that they would finally recognize that this assault on the Affordable Care Act in the court system is a really awful precedent to set, and it's going to come back and bite all of us as legislators if it were to be successful. And without any real hope of a replacement for the Affordable Care Act, it leads to humanitarian disaster in which 30 million -- 20 million to 30 million people lose insurance because of it. So this is as important as it gets. There's very little that matters to people more than their health and their health care. And I hope that possibly next week we can come together as a body and finally do something about the administration's attempt to take away these protections for sick people and people with complicated diagnoses all across the country. 

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