As Obamacare Woes Hit Utah, Hatch Touts Highly-Praised Alternative
WASHINGTON—Reports of continued problems with the President’s signature health-care law in Utah were highlighted by the Beehive State’s senior senator, Orrin Hatch, on the Senate floor Wednesday, covering the gamut from rising premiums to a failed insurance co-op that will leave 35,000 Utahns uninsured. Senator Hatch, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee charged with oversight of Obamacare, also spoke about his widely praised alternative plan, the Patient CARE Act.
“The latest co-op failure was announced just yesterday and took place in my own state of Utah, hitting pretty close to home for a number of people in my state who are just trying to find affordable health insurance,” Hatch said.
Major management problems have struck a number of other co-ops around the country. Twenty-one of the 23 co-ops that received loans from the federal government had suffered major losses despite the expectation the expectation that the loans would last 15 years. Ten of these co-ops, including Utah’s, had been forced to close completely.
In addition to the failed co-op program, The Salt Lake Tribune and The Deseret News reported hikes in insurance premiums for state residents. According to the reports, insurance rates for plans on Utah’s federally-run exchange will be 22 percent higher on average next year.
Hatch—a long-time of opponent of the President’s health-care law—coauthored the Patient CARE Act, a legislative proposal that repeals Obamacare and replaces it with a plan that not only lowers costs but also expands consumer choice.
“We can take action to right this ship now. We can control costs. We can take government out of the equation and give patients and consumers more choices,” Hatch argued. "There are a number of ideas out there that would accomplish these goals. The sooner more of our colleagues—particularly those on the other side of the aisle—recognize and admit the failure of Obamacare, the sooner we can begin to work together on a plan that delivers real results to the American people.”
The complete speech, as prepared for delivery, is below:
Mr. President, it has been a while since I’ve come to the Senate floor to talk about the shortcomings of the so-called Affordable Care Act – a few months at least. The last time I spoke about Obamacare here on the floor, I spoke at some length about the ever-increasing insurance premiums that had resulted from the law’s draconian mandates and regulations.
Sadly, as I rise today to revisit this subject, things haven’t gotten better for Obamacare. In fact, if the Obama Administration’s own estimates are to be believed, things are actually getting much worse.
As we all know, this Sunday – November 1st – marks the beginning of the 2016 open enrollment period for the Obamacare health insurance exchanges. This is an important milestone for the health law, in large part because President Obama and his supporters have, since the day the law was passed, repeatedly promised that, as Americans become more familiar with how the law works, the more they will grow to love it.
Obamacare proponents wrote off problems in the first year of enrollment as glitches that were to be expected as the country transitioned to a new health care system.
Problems in the second year were similarly dismissed as necessary growing pains as everyone learned from the mistakes that were made the previous year.
Now, as we approach the third year of enrollment, supporters of the President’s healthcare law are running out of excuses. At this point, most reasonable Americans – including many who may have initially been huge supporters of this endeavor – expect the system created under the law to work the way it was designed to work.
And, you know what, Mr. President? The law IS working the way it was designed to work. The problem is that it’s not working the way the designers SAID it would work.
At the time the law was drafted, the architects of Obamacare SAID that they could impose all new mandates and regulations on the insurance market, requiring massively expanded coverage above and beyond consumer demand, claiming that any increased costs that resulted from these requirements would be offset when more young and relatively healthy consumers were forced to buy insurance or pay a fine.
Of course, they only called it a “fine” when they were drafting the law and initially selling it to the American people. Now, a few years and a Supreme Court decision later, we’re all supposed to call that “fine” a “tax.”
But, I digress.
My point, Mr. President, is that those who drafted the President’s health law and then subsequently forced it through Congress on a strictly partisan basis SAID that their new system would expand health coverage for everyone without increasing costs. In fact, they went further – they claimed that it would actually bring costs down.
However, due to the way the law was actually designed, it was never going to work that way.
No matter how many ad campaigns the government charged to the taxpayers and no matter how many talk shows the President went on to encourage hip, young audiences to enroll in the exchanges, the numbers were never going to add up.
This is true for one simple reason: For all the attention the drafters of Obamacare paid to expanding coverage and remaking the health insurance industry, they didn’t do anything to reduce the actual cost of healthcare in America.
The problems with Obamacare are not due to bad marketing, they are the result of fundamental design flaws.
Healthcare costs are the biggest barrier keeping participants out of the insurance market.
Healthcare costs are among the main factors contributing to wage stagnation for American workers.
And, healthcare costs continue to be the single biggest problem plaguing our nation’s healthcare system.
Yet, despite these obvious problems, healthcare costs were all-but ignored when the so-called Affordable Care Act was being drafted.
And, the few provisions in the law that WERE aimed at bringing down costs were either poorly conceived, terribly implemented, or both.
For example, we had the Consumer Operated and Oriented Plans, or CO-OP, program, which was created to encourage the development of a non-profit health insurance sector. Specifically, under the CO-OP program, HHS dealt out $2.4 billion in loans to 23 non-profit startup plans, many of which were headed, not by insurance or healthcare experts, but by political activists with no actual business experience.
Almost immediately, we began to hear reports of mismanagement in the program and poor decision-making at the CO-OPs themselves. Earlier this year, the HHS Office of Inspector General Reported that 21 of the 23 CO-OPs that received loans under the program – loans that were supposed to last for 15 years, by the way – had suffered staggering losses. This, of course, was not surprising, given the inexperience of many of the founders of the CO-OPs and the lack of oversight and accountability at HHS with regard to the program.
And, while a non-profit health insurer may not be focused on avoiding losses, one would assume that, at the very least, staying in business would be a priority. Yet, over the last several months, 10 of the 23 CO-OPs have had to close their doors, with more failures expected in the near future. The latest CO-OP failure was announced just yesterday and took place in my state of Utah, hitting pretty close to home for a number of people in my state who are just trying to find affordable health insurance.
Every time one of these CO-OPs fails, they leave patients and customers in the lurch. A failed CO-OP in New York – which was called “Health Republic” and was considered by many to be a flagship for the loan program – will leave more than 150,000 customers looking for new insurance when its doors close at the end of the year.
And, of course, $2.4 billion is hardly chump change, Mr. President. Yet, that’s how much the American taxpayers have shelled out to these CO-OPs, and, as of right now, it is unlikely that any of that money is ever coming back.
Despite these obvious problems with Obamacare, we hear a constant drumbeat from our friends on the other side of the aisle that the law is a smashing success. My friends and colleagues have gotten very, very good at cherry-picking favorable data points to make these types of claims.
They’ll cite an enrollment number out of context or a premium projection that is slightly smaller than one that came before it as evidence that Obamacare is working and that only problems with the healthcare system they so graciously gifted to the American people are the terrible Republicans who have dared to raise objections.
I expect that, as time wears on, and the number of isolated-yet-favorable data points continues to get smaller and smaller, more people will see this ruse for what it is.
Case in point, earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services released its latest projections for enrollment in the Obamacare exchanges. And, for anyone who has an interest – political, financial, or otherwise – in defending the Affordable Care Act, the numbers aren’t good – and I’m being kind when I say that.
The Obama Administration projects that, in 2016, roughly 1.3 million people will newly enroll on the exchanges.
Now, 1.3 million may sound like a big number. However, as always, context is important here.
When the law was originally passed in 2010, the Congressional Budget Office projected that we’d see an increase of about eight million enrollees on the exchanges in 2016 compared to 2015. Now, HHS is predicting that enrollment will be less than a quarter of that projection.
It gets worse.
In 2010, CBO also projected that, by the end of 2016, roughly 21 million patients would be enrolled in plans purchased on the exchanges. Now, HHS projects that the number will likely be less than half that – probably a little more than 10 million people.
In other words, all the rosy claims and predictions we heard at the time the law was passed about the impact these new exchanges would have on insurance markets and premiums were based, in large part, on the assumption that twice as many people would enroll. Now, by its own terms, Obamacare is becoming a bigger failure by the day.
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