WASHINGTON – During the first in a series of bipartisan hearings hosted by the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee on improving the Affordable Care Act (ACA), U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the HELP Committee, emphasized on Wednesday that Republicans and Democrats need to work together to make reforms that stabilize the health care marketplace. Murphy received feedback from Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance Commissioner Julie McPeak and Washington State Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler.

Click here to view video of Murphy’s remarks.

“I’m so appreciative of the process that both Senator Alexander and Senator Murray have begun, and I acknowledge the fact that we need to make some changes – changes that Democrats want and changes that Republicans want – in order to provide some certainty,” said Murphy. “I support the Chairman’s goal of getting a narrow package that can pass quickly, but I hope that we do include in our discussion this dramatic reduction in advertising and marketing funding, which I think does have a fairly dispositive effect on the health of these exchanges.”

Highlights of Murphy’s remarks are below:

“Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

 “Ms. McPeak, I wanted to ask you to expand a little bit on your opening comments in which you talked about predicting last year that your marketplaces were on the verge of collapse. And as you testified today, they have not collapsed during that time. And I guess it speaks to a worry that I have about how the rhetoric gets overheated with respect to the stability of these exchanges and the overall stability of the Affordable Care Act.

“I’m so appreciative of the process that both Senator Alexander and Senator Murray have begun, and I acknowledge the fact that we need to make some changes – changes that Democrats want and changes that Republicans want – in order to provide some certainty. 

“But maybe talk a little bit about what happened over the last year. You said that you were on the verge of collapse, you didn’t collapse, and what does that say about how these marketplaces are and have been holding together?

“I just think it’s a caution for everybody to be a little bit careful about how fast we declare that the sky is falling.”

…

“Mr. Kreidler, I wanted to talk to you about the importance of advertising and marketing. You’re an interesting state because you’ve got pretty much every type of population that exists – rural communities, suburban communities, communities with easy access to information resources, places where it’s a little bit harder to get the word out. 

“There’s a study out of Kentucky that looks at what happens when the marketing efforts effectively stopped. You had a Democratic governor who was doing robust marketing, and then the new Republican governor has effectively shut down funding for ACA advertising. And what happened there was that there were 450,000 fewer page views per week on the website for the state marketplace, there were 20,000 fewer unique visitors per week to the website, and guess what? ACA enrollment fell by 100,000 people to 94,000 people in 2016, to now 81,000 people.

“So there seems to be a pretty direct correlation between telling people that these options exist and people actually going and taking a look at the information that would lead them to get coverage. That speaks to what’s happening right now with a 90 percent reduction in federal funding.” 

…

“I support the Chairman’s goal of getting a narrow package that can pass quickly, but I hope that we do include in our discussion this dramatic reduction in advertising and marketing funding, which I think does have a fairly dispositive effect on the health of these exchanges.”

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