Congressman Doyle Takes Them To School On The ACA. Again.

My transcript:

Thank You Mr. Chairman, I support the amendment.

You know there is a lot of amnesia on on this committee. Let me just remind my friends where we were before the Affordable Care Act and what your constituents got for their money.

Before the ACA, insurance companies could discriminate against sick people.  We put a waiver on the pre-existing condition clause that they couldn't do that anymore. That didn't exist before ACA. In America, one of the leading causes of bankruptcy - were people that were losing their homes because they had insurance but they had a child or someone in the family with a chronic condition and they come up against their cap and they couldn't get any more payment from the insurance company and they would hold fish fries to try to raise money to buy medicine for their kids and eventually they went bankrupt and lost their homes.

We put an end to that. We said insurance companies can't cap your benefits annually or lifetime. That didn't exist before the for the Affordable Care Act. Women were being charged twice as much as men. We put an end to that. Children could stay on their parents policy now till they're twenty-six. That didn't exist before the Affordable Care Act. We expanded the Medicaid program. Fourteen million Americans got covered on that.  Eleven million of which which never had insurance before. For the first time got insurance under the Affordable Care Act. That didn't exist before we implemented that.

So don't call this a failure because it's not a failure. If it was such a failure why isn't that you haven't just abolished all those things we did? No, you haven't. You're keeping pre-existing conditions. You're keeping caps on the benefits. You know you're letting kids stay on their policy until they're twenty-six. Because these were good things that we did on the Affordable Care Act - that the American people support.

Now all you've done in this bill is basically giveaway six hundred billion dollars over the next ten years to corporations and rich people. You have taken that money out of the bill and now the way you're going to pay for this is to eviscerate the Medicare expansion program - to just eviscerate the Medicaid expansion program - and to take money out of the Medicare trust fund.

This, this is an improvement?

You haven't done a thing to lower costs in this bill. You're going to see the elderly pay more for their insurance because these subsidies aren't based on one's income anymore - they're based on their age. And and now the bands are going to be five - you're going to be able to charge insurance companies five times as much as the as the youngest band in the program, where right now it's three.

All these things that you're making such a big deal - that you're keeping, because if you didn't keep them, you guys to be tarred and feathered out of your districts - that you're keeping them because these were things we did that every one of you voted against, when we did this with the Affordable Care Act. So  don't stand here those of us that did this bill and watch fifty of our colleagues lose their position because they knew it was the right thing to do and cast the vote anyway and try to take credit that you've somehow done something great for the American people.

The only thing that's any good about what you're proposing are the things that we did eight years ago in the Affordable Care Act.

I yield back.

Give 'em hell, Congressman. Give 'em hell.