Tuberville Calls Out Democrats for Hypocrisy on Obamacare

WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) delivered a floor speech exposing Democrats for their hypocrisy on Obamacare. Not a single Republican voted for Obamacare in 2010, and yet, Democrats are trying to blame Republicans for the sky-high health care premiums Americans are seeing today.

Read Senator Tuberville's speech below or watch on YouTube or Rumble.

"For months, our Democratic colleagues have been fearmongering about our health care system. You know, they blamed everyone but themselves for the sky-rocketing premiums Americans are dealing with today.

The truth is, Obamacare destroyed-absolutely destroyed-our health care system. It is completely unaffordable. As a result, American families are now paying the enormous price for Barack Obama and woke Democrats' Obamacare system. Sure, the idea of Obamacare sounded-it sounded great. Who doesn't love the idea of free health care? But those of us who live in reality or understand basic economics knew this was never, ever going to work, which is why not a single Republican voted for it in the Senate or the House when it was voted on.

You see, Obamacare was always destined to fail. You can't pump billions of dollars into healthcare and not expect rampant fraud to take place. It's not possible. Nevertheless, woke Democrats rammed it through Congress, and it was signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010. It was the biggest overhaul of our health care system since Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.

On paper, it sounded great-expand access, protect people with preexisting conditions, and make insurance cheaper for families without employer plans. But to no one's surprise, what started as a bold Democratic dream of affordable coverage for all…it turned into a bloated mess. In fact, the only winners of Obamacare are the big insurance companies who are getting filthy rich on the taxpayers' money. Meanwhile, Americans are spending thousands of dollars on premiums for coverage that often doesn't cover their needs.

And Americans can thank nine of my current Democrat colleagues who voted 'Yes' on that final passage in December 2009, Senator[s] Murray, Cantwell, Wyden, Merkley, Schumer, Gillibrand, Coons, Durbin, Sanders, Tammy Baldwin, who was in the House at the time. These Democrats jam[med] this through with not a single Republican vote, ignoring real concerns about how the system would limit competition, leading to lower standards of care. Or how it would line the pockets of big insurance companies, while forcing hardworking Americans to pay high premiums. Or how it would decrease transparency, leading Americans who often leave the doctor's office not having a clue how much money they owe when they leave. Or how rural hospitals, rural hospitals, would be forced to close their doors and doctors and nurses would be leaving the medical field because they couldn't make a living. […]

They didn't care about any of it because they always knew we would end up today in the position we are in. Fifteen years later, they knew costs would become unaffordable for Americans. They knew that. But they were just fine with that because their end goal is to have socialized medicine paid for by American taxpayers, which by the way, has not worked anywhere in the world. They have terrible health care when they do that.

Obamacare was just the first step towards free health care for all. The first step. To start, Obamacare created state federal marketplaces where individuals could shop for coverage. These marketplaces were intended to be online [stores] for health plans.

By the way, if you remember this, they spent about ten billion dollars and couldn't get the health care website going, but we wasted all this money. When they launched this, it just crashed. People couldn't use it for weeks, months. It cost us hundreds of millions of dollars. […] That was a foreshadowing of the disaster to come if you just think about it.

On the marketplace. Health plans are sorted in different levels: bronze, silver gold and platinum. Each level shows how costs are split with bronze being the most basic and platinum being the best and higher coverage. For example, the middle-of-the-road silver plan means that the insurer pays for 70% of your care-the insurance companies. The enrollee pays the remaining 30% through deductibles, copays, and coinsurance. Regardless of tier status, each plan covers what is called essential health benefits. Things like hospital stays, maternity care, prescription, emergencies, and preventive services.

That sounds comprehensive, doesn't it? But it came at a heavy, heavy price, driving up costs from day one. This is where Democrats' real problem started. You know, they named this ridiculous bill, the 'Affordable Care Act,' so they couldn't have headlines on day one, saying how prices were going up.

So, what'd they do? To address this affordability issue, Democrats came up with two big financial plans to supposedly help with affordability. The first thing they did was create cost-sharing-reductions, which were designed for lower-income buyers who had the silver plan. Basically, CSRs allowed the government to help these silver plan enrollees pay out-of-pocket costs like deductibles and copays, shifting the bulk of the cost to who? The American taxpayers. By 2017, a court ruling stopped these ridiculous CSR payments, so insurance started raising silver plan prices to cover that gap that the court said you couldn't do. As a result, families saw their premium jump 20-30% in some states.

And the second big Democrat idea was the premium tax credits, which was created for people earning about $15,000 [dollars] a year. And it was capped at those making $60,000 [dollars] a year. Now this program ballooned during the pandemic when Democrats decided to expand these subsidies. In 2021, The American Rescue Plan got rid of the [$60,000 dollar] income cap, meaning higher income Americans could now qualify for the subsidies. This meant that many lower-income Americans got zero premium plans for the very first time. This caused enrollment in the Obamacare to double in just five years, double from 11 million people enrolled in 2020 to 24 million in [2025].

Here we go. This was all thanks to fatter subsidies, slacker rules, and year-round special enrollment periods, which allowed people to sign up anytime-no questions asked. These exchanges didn't lower costs. They just shifted the bill to who? The American taxpayers.

Premiums kept rising, thanks to price gouging and decreased competition, but the taxpayer-funded subsidies temporarily shielded enrollees from seeing how much costs were going up. Take a family of four earning $80,000 dollars, for example. They might have paid $500 [dollars] a month for coverage before Democrats expanded these subsidies. Five hundred a month. But now, they're paying zero for coverage. While you, the American taxpayer, are stuck with paying the rest of the bill. It's moving closer and closer to socialized medicine. This is all thanks to the Democrats', broken subsidy system. And guess who benefits the most? Not you.

A Joint Economic Committee report revealed that insurers and brokers are getting rich off of these subsidies. For every one dollar that is paid by the taxpayers, the families only get 34 cents of this one dollar. The other, where does it go? It goes to the insurance companies or it just disappears. Wonder where that goes? That's not affordability. That is a straight- up scam that the American taxpayers are facing.

Even worse, these loose rules turned the marketplace into a fraud playground. Enhanced subsidies made plans free for people earning $15,000-23,000 dollars year. So, of course, people started fudging the numbers to qualify for free coverage. Brokers and scammers piled on, [gaming] the system, claiming to enroll people for free coverage while stealing money for themselves. A Paragon Institute report estimated that there were 5-6.4 [million] cases of fraud last year alone.

To try to catch some of the fraud-the Government Accountability Office-they tried their own scam. They created 44 false applicants. They made up Social Security numbers. They ran it through the system. Shockingly, 96% of the Government Accountability Office's fake applications got approved. One hundred percent free health care.

It's hard to figure out how exactly these people are getting enrolled. Some are lying about their income. Some are double-dipping with Medicaid and some-some might just not be citizens of this country. Sound familiar? All of this fraud is hard to stop and hard to wrap your mind around.

But unfortunately, the scam of Obamacare is much bigger than fraudulent enrollees. That's because Obamacare just didn't destroy our health care system. It also paid for itself by getting the government involved in student loans. You heard me right. We're gonna pay this-Obamacare is gonna pay for it through student loans. So, loans went from being managed […] by the banks to the federal government-loaning to go to college. What a great idea. As a result, education is more expensive than ever. And listen to this: today, after [15] years, 45 million students across this country owe $2 trillion dollars. Embarrassing. We are screwing over our young people who are just starting out in life-all to prop up this broken Obamacare system.

Obamacare promised lower costs and better care, but 15 years in, it has delivered just the opposite. Obamacare premiums have nearly doubled since 2014, not to mention the outrageous bills you get after you leave the doctor. Quality health care has gone [down]. Hospitals all over the country have been forced to close. We're losing doctors and nurses [left and] right because these jobs don't pay what they used to. Because we don't have transparency in the system, bad actors are able to hide prices, insurers face no real competition, and COVID subsidies allowed scammers to get rich off of fraudulent money that was intended for the most vulnerable.

So, no, this is not Republicans' fault, as you're hearing. Not a single Republican voted for this disaster called the Affordable Care Act. Democrats have voted for it then, and Democrats are the ones who own this disaster today.

Oh, by the way, your premiums aren't going up 20% starting in January because of expiring COVID subsidies, like Democrats want you to believe. That's not happening. These credits are going up only three, four, five percent. The rest of the premiums are going up because insurance companies are charging more. […]

They're getting rich off the American taxpayers. That's what's happening. The way I see it, there are three main problems with the current healthcare system.

The first problem is that Democrats have created a broken system that needs to be repaired, and we're gonna do that. I'm glad to see several of my Republican colleagues are working on this daily. I'm hopeful that any Republican plan will focus on the main issue: affordability. The only way to lower costs is through more competition and more transparency. We need more plans to give Americans more of a choice when it comes to insurance plans. This is the only way to drive costs down.

The second problem is that Democrats allowed 20-30 million illegals to come into this country under Joe Biden, many of whom came from third-world countries. Now many of these people have never, ever been to the doctor-have all sorts of health problems. These illegals are now overrunning our emergency rooms, and you, the American taxpayer, are paying for it. Next time you go to the ER, see how long it takes you to get in and then blame the Democrats. And the next time a hospital in your town closes, as has happened all over my state of Alabama, blame the Democrats.

The third problem is that we are horribly sick in this country. Americans are the unhealthiest we have ever been. Seventy-four percent of Americans are either overweight or obese. More than 76% of Americans have at least one chronic disease. Cancer rates are increasing among young people at [an] alarming rate. If we do not start getting healthier in this country by working out, eating healthier, and getting rid of processed food and toxic ingredients, we are not going to make it. Our health care system was not built to support so many unhealthy people. Fifty years ago, you didn't have any of this crap because Americans were more active and didn't have all this processed food. We are over-medicated, overweight, and sicker than ever, and our healthcare system simply wasn't built to handle it. Thank God that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is working around the clock to make America healthy again. We need it.

And at the end of the day, Republicans have control of the Senate, the House, and the White House. We have no excuse not to do something about this health care disaster. We need to come up with a plan that actually delivers for the American people. This is not a Republican or Democrat problem. Every American is getting screwed-screwed over every day by this horrible health care system. The Republican Party is working to fix this. Let's grow a backbone and do what is right for the American people."

Senator Tommy Tuberville represents Alabama in the United States Senate and is a member of the Senate Armed Services, Agriculture, Veterans' Affairs, HELP and Aging Committees.

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