Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, that sets the final vote on our bill to fix No Child Left Behind tomorrow morning at 10:45 a.m. I don't think there is any doubt what the result will be. We have had a series of votes that give a pretty clear indication of where the Senate is. The vote today was 84 to 12 to cut off debate and move to the final vote. Senators who wish to speak between now and then can do that. Senator Murray, in her remarks, mentioned how good this process has been, and I wish to call that to the attention of Senators as well. The Senate can operate pretty well under the rules that it has if Senators will agree to cooperate with one another. I said before that I think one reason Senator Murray works so well toward a result, even though she is a partisan leader in the Democratic conference, is because she used to be a preschool teacher, and in kindergarten you learn how to work well with others and that is true in her case. That is actually true with all of the members of our committee. We have as much divergence on our committee, with 22 members, as does any committee. I will not name the names of the Senators, but there is almost no one who can dispute that. Yet we went through a process, which Senator Murray and I agreed on at her suggestion, and this is what happened: We had 22 members in the committee vote yes to move the bill to the floor. That is every single member of the committee. Several of those members agreed to withhold amendments that might have been damaging to the bill so we could deal with them on the floor. In the committee we considered 58 amendments and 29 were adopted. Twenty-four of the adopted amendments were offered by Democrats and five amendments were offered by Republicans. Then we went to the floor. When we moved to the floor, the vote was 81 to 17--not quite as good as today, but it was a very good vote. We had 52 Member priorities incorporated into a substitute amendment. In other words, 52 Senators made suggestions about the final bill. Forty-four of these were priorities requested by Democrats and eight were priorities requested by Republicans. On the Senate floor, 177 amendments were filed and 78 were considered--23 by rollcall vote and 65 amendments were agreed to. Forty of the adopted amendments were offered by Democrats, 25 by Republicans. Sometimes I have heard it said that we don't have time to deal with amendments. We dealt with 177 amendments on the floor in less than a week. The practice of going around to our colleagues and talking them out of amendments takes more time than it does to actually vote on them and to give them a chance to participate. In conference 17 more amendments were filed, 10 from the House, 7 from the Senate. Of those 17 amendments, 9 were considered and 7 were agreed to--4 Democrats, 3 Republicans. I suggest to the Senate and President that it is not a secret why we were able to succeed this year in fixing a bill that is very difficult to fix. We know that because we have tried very hard in each of the last two Congresses, working with the Secretary of Education, House Republicans and Democrats, and the Senate Republicans and Democrats. We spent a lot of hours working on a bill, but we failed. Why did we have more success this time? I think it is because everybody had a part in the process, everybody had a chance to have their say. We had amendments in committee, we had amendments on the floor, and we had amendments in the conference. If you are convinced that you had a chance to have your say, then it is easier to say: Ok. Let's vote. I might win or lose, but at least I had my say and we need to get a result. I would like to see more of that here. We can do that fairly easily, and the key to it is allowing amendments. It is possible, under the Senate rules, for Senator Murray to offer an amendment and to try to make it pending, and I can object. If I then offer an amendment, she might object, and then the whole process collapses. So any one of us can keep the Senate functioning as it should, but in this case--an issue when there are alligators lurking in every corner of the pond that could have brought this to a halt and nearly did several times--we were able to go through the process and get a result for the benefit of 50 million children and 3.4 million teachers in 100,000 public schools. Someone asked me earlier yesterday what it would take to have the American people have a higher opinion of the U.S. Congress. My answer is actions such as this, where we take an issue that affects real Americans in the schools they attend, the homes where they are doing their homework, and the teachers who are working every day--this affects every single one of them. This empowers them to do their job. This creates an opportunity for a new era of innovation and excellence in student achievement. When we work together to get this result, I think people think better of the process here. As I said earlier, it is possible to just stand here and say: Here is my opinion, and if I don't get 100 percent, I will vote no. If that were all I wanted to do, I would stay home. I would stand on the street corner or get my own radio show or column, offer my opinion for about 5 minutes, and then go do something else, but I wouldn't waste my time trying to be a U.S. Senator. It is hard to get here, and then it is hard to stay here. So while you are here, you might as well amount to something, and amounting to something as a U.S. Senator is getting a principled result on issues that are important to the American people. We have done that this year more than most people might think. Senator Murray has a well-known reputation in this body, not just for being a Democratic leader but for being someone who is interested in a result. Senator Wyden is working with Senator Hatch on tax extenders and Senator Udall worked with Senator Vitter on chemical safety. The Energy bill that came out of committee depended upon Senator Cantwell as well as Senator Murkowski. The mental health bill that came out of our committee came from Senators Murray and Alexander. The cyber security bill that passed the Senate was the work of Senator Feinstein as well as Senator Burr. The trafficking victims law came from Senators McCaskill and Cornyn. The terrorism risk insurance was the result of Senators Brown and Shelby working together. The Iran Nuclear Review Act, which is a pretty extraordinary bill, started with Senator Menendez, then Senator Cardin, along with Senator Corker. The Veterans Suicide Prevention Act came from Senators Durbin and McCain. I haven't even mentioned all of the important legislation that came through the Senate this year. So it is perfectly possible for us to deal with very important pieces of legislation if we work together, and both Democratic and Republican Senators have all shown they can work together. I look forward to the vote tomorrow at 10:45 a.m. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, the Senator is correct. Student assessments must be designed and administered with a high degree of quality assurance. State assessment results can be used as the basis for critical decisions affecting the lives of students and the funding and operation of schools, and given the significant taxpayer investment for statewide assessments, we must provide States with the flexibility to use funds to preserve and maintain the integrity and validity of these important assessments.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on December 8, 2015, at 9:30 a.m.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on December 8, 2015, at 3 p.m., in room SR- 253 of the Russell Senate Office Building to conduct a hearing entitled ``Data or Dogma? Promoting Open Inquiry in the Debate over the Magnitude of Human Impact on Earth's Climate.''

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on December 8, 2015, at 10 a.m., in room SD- 366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on December 8, 2015, at 10 a.m.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on December 8, 2015, at 10:15 a.m., to conduct a hearing entitled ``Millennium Challenge Corporation: Lessons Learned after a Decade and Outlook for the Future.''

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, in a few minutes we will be voting on the President's nominee to fill a vacancy in the Eastern District of Tennessee. Mr. McDonough is well known to me and is well known to my colleague, Senator Corker. Mr. McDonough received his undergraduate degree from Sewanee before going on to law school at Vanderbilt. He was a member of a prominent Chattanooga law firm, Miller & Martin. He was chief of staff to Chattanooga's mayor. He is a well-qualified man. We are fortunate that he is willing to serve, and we are fortunate the President nominated him. I urge my colleagues to vote for him. I yield the floor. Mr. President, I yield back all time.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to lead a colloquy with Senators Burr, Isakson, Cassidy, and Scott for up to 20 minutes.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Senator Cassidy, of course, has a unique perspective on this as a practicing physician. I think he still practices some--as much as he can within the Senate rules--but he sees patients regularly. I ask Senator Cassidy, what was the effect of this new health care law 5\1/2\ years ago on the ability of patients to choose their own physicians?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, today we are talking about repealing Obamacare and moving in a completely different direction toward more choices and lower costs for Americans as they search for their health care plans. I came to the floor yesterday and brought back a memory from 5\1/2\ years ago of the President's health care summit, nationally televised all day long at the Blair House, with 36 Members of Congress and the President of the United States. I had a chance, leading off for the Republican speakers that day, to say respectfully to President Obama: Mr. President, this health care plan of yours is going to impose a huge Medicaid unfunded mandate on State budgets, which will raise tuitions and take money from other State programs. It will take money out of Medicare and spend it on something else. It will increase taxes, it will raise premiums, and it will cost jobs. Unfortunately, that all turned out to be true. The Senator from Georgia, Mr. Isakson, was there, as I was, on that Christmas Eve. It was a cold night when the Democrats had, for a few months, 60 votes, and they rammed through Obamacare in the middle of the night with all Democratic votes, no Republican votes, with us warning what would happen. Now, I say to Senator Isakson, the premiums in Georgia, I believe will go up 29 percent for some plans.

Mr. ALEXANDER. And I wonder if the Senator has been hearing from some of his constituents about their premium increases.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Georgia for his leadership on the HELP Committee on which all of us serve. One of the newer members of the HELP Committee brings a lot of expertise: Senator Cassidy from Louisiana. He wasn't there, at least not in the Senate, on the night Obamacare passed, but he has written forcefully about the fact that while premiums have been going up, something else was going down, and that is family incomes because of the 30-hour work week. Senator Cassidy had an article in Forbes magazine in 2014 that pointed out the impact of the 30-hour work week in Obamacare and how that was hurting working families.

Mr. ALEXANDER. What the Senator is saying, if I hear him right, is that in the worst of circumstances, the effect of Obamacare on some of the people he is talking with means they are working less hours, so they have less money. Their insurance premium is higher, and so is their deductible. That is the effect.

Mr. ALEXANDER. The essential problem with Obamacare for people who buy individual insurance, it seems to me, I say to Senator Isakson, is that Washington tells you what insurance to buy. I think of a woman named Emilie in Middle Tennessee who has lupus and who had a policy she could afford. It had modest benefits and it didn't cost very much, but it fit her needs, but Obamacare canceled that policy. When she went online to find another policy under Obamacare, her costs went up from $100 to $400 a month. I guess the Senator has heard stories like that as well in Georgia.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Senator Isakson, before he came to the Senate, was a small businessman in Georgia. Probably the largest employer in our country is the hospitality industry--restaurants, hotels, that sort of thing, employing many young people, many minority people. I met with a number of restaurant owners, who told me after Obamacare passed that because of the costs of that insurance to the company, their goal would be to reduce the number of employees from 90 to 70. So Obamacare costs jobs. Did the Senator have that kind of experience in Georgia as well?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Memphis is proud of the fact that it is a center for medical device innovation. Some of the leading medical device companies in the world are located in Memphis, TN. The Obamacare bill--part of its trillion dollars in new taxes included a medical device tax which put an especially onerous tax on the gross income of medical devices companies, causing the President in Costa Rica to put up signs saying ``Welcome to Costa Rica'' to medical device companies. I wonder if in Louisiana or Georgia you had any experience with the impact of the medical device tax on your constituents?

Mr. ALEXANDER. I say to Senator Isakson, I recall one of the most vigorous debates we had 5\1/2\ years ago was first the President saying: We won't touch Medicare. Next thing you know, they took $700 billion out of Medicare to spend on new programs, at a time when the Medicare trustees, whose job it is to tell us things like this, said: The program is going to go broke unless we do something about it. We were saying: If you are going to take money away from grandma's Medicare, you better spend it on grandma. But they didn't. It impacted Medicare recipients in Georgia, Tennessee, and Louisiana.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, how much time remains in our colloquy?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Six minutes remaining. We have heard a lot in the news about co-ops. Co-ops were an invention of Obamacare that were designed to provide health care to many Americans. I know that in South Carolina, for example--closure of these co-ops for 67,000 South Carolinians and 27,000 Tennesseans--means that suddenly they have to find new coverage. I wonder if either in Louisiana or Georgia, you have had any experience with the new co-ops in Obamacare?

Mr. ALEXANDER. During the debate 5\1/2\ years ago at the health care summit at the Blair House, our Democratic friends said: Well, when are you Republicans going to come up with a big, comprehensive plan? My answer to them was: If you are waiting for Senator McConnell to roll a wheelbarrow onto the Senate floor with a 2,700 page McConnell-care bill, you are going to be waiting until the sky turns purple because we don't believe in that. We don't think we are wise enough in Washington, DC, to write a comprehensive plan for everything about the American health care for all the people in this country. Instead, what we proposed to do--and we proposed it over and over again--was to move step by step in a different direction toward more choices, more freedom, and lower costs. In fact, I counted it up, and 173 times in the Congressional Record in the year 2009, we Republicans laid out our plans step by step toward those causes, steps like the step Senator Scott from South Carolina took in a bipartisan way just this year to give States the ability to set the rates for the kind of insurance small businesses could buy and avoid an 18-percent increase in premiums. Those are the kinds of steps we would take in a different direction to give the American people those options. Our time for the colloquy has expired. I thank the Senator from Georgia, Mr. Isakson, and the Senator from Louisiana, Mr. Cassidy. We Republicans said 5\1/2\ years ago that premiums would go up, taxes would go up, jobs would be lost, and that State budgets would be burdened by Medicaid, and all that turned out to be true, unfortunately. The President said: If you like your plan, you can keep it. That turned out to be untrue, unfortunately. We are prepared to go in a different direction--more choices, more freedom, lower costs--but first, this week we are going to repeal Obamacare, which has caused such problems for the American people, and then we will head in a different direction. I thank the Presiding Officer. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 30 minutes in morning business.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, let me take my colleagues back 5\1/2\ years to February 25, 2010, and the White House health care summit at the Blair House--the same place where Senator Arthur Vandenberg sat down with George Marshall. They met privately to discuss the postwar plans after World War II. The result of that discussion became the Marshall Plan. It was the perfect setting--it is the perfect setting for a serious, bipartisan discussion for how to improve health care for Americans. Thirty-six Members of Congress went to the Blair House that day at the invitation of President Obama. We were there to discuss the health care bill passed by the Democrats, what is now known as Obamacare. We stayed there all day. The President stayed there too. It was televised continuously. Both then-Minority Leader Boehner and Republican Leader McConnell asked me to lead off in speaking for Republicans. I said to the President that day that I was there not only to represent the view of Republicans but that I was there also as a former Governor and that I would like to have a chance to speak for the Governors as well because Governors managing States had a big stake in all of this. I also said that I was at the summit to represent the views of a great many of the American people who have tried to say in every way they knew how--through town meetings, through surveys, through elections in Virginia and New Jersey and Massachusetts--that they oppose the health care bill that was passed in the Senate in the middle of a snowstorm on Christmas Eve. I warned the President then about the unfortunate consequences of Obamacare for millions of Americans. I said to the President that this would send an unfunded Medicaid mandate to States. I said: ``It will cut Medicare by about half a trillion dollars and spend most of that on new programs. . . . It means there will be about a half trillion dollars of new taxes in it. It means that for millions of Americans, premiums will go up, because when people pay those new taxes, premiums will go up, and they will also go up because of the government mandates.'' That is what I said 5\1/2\ years ago. I said directly to the President then that instead of this partisan plan passed without the support of a single Republican in the Senate, we Republicans were prepared to work with him to reform health care. I said 5\1/2\ years ago to the President that we need to start over and go step-by-step in a different direction toward the goal of reducing health care costs. I said then that this means working together in the way that General Marshall and Senator Vandenberg did following World War II, and it means going step-by-step together to re-earn the trust of the American people. Those were my words to the President of the United States at the health care summit 5\1/2\ years ago. The President and the congressional Democrats listened all day, but they didn't take any of my advice and hardly any of the advice of my Republican colleagues about what the disastrous outcomes of Obamacare would be. So now, 5\1/2\ years after the law was passed and 2 years into its implementation, we can say one thing without question: The unfortunate reality for the American people is that they are struggling with Obamacare and that 5\1/2\ years ago Republicans were right. Obamacare was and is an historic mistake. Republicans agreed with the President and his party that our health care system was broken. We agreed that it needed to be fixed, but we argued that the President was moving in the wrong direction. What Obamacare did was to expand a broken system that everyone knew was too expensive. Republicans said so at the summit in February of 2010, and the facts today show we were right. Let's take a closer look at what Republicans said then, nearly 6 years ago, and what unfortunately came true. Let's look also at what Democrats predicted back then--or better put, what they promised--and which of their predictions and promises came true. Let's go through them one by one. First, Medicaid. During my opening remarks at the Blair House at the summit, I said this: ``Nothing used to make me madder as Governor than when Washington politicians would get together, pass a bill, take credit for it, and send me the bill to pay.'' That is exactly what Obamacare does with the expansion of Medicaid. In addition, it dumps 15 to 18 million low-income Americans into a Medicaid program that none of us would want to be a part of because 50 percent of the doctors won't see new patients. So it is like giving someone a ticket to a bus line when the bus runs only half the time. That is what I said 5\1/2\ years ago. Medicaid had already always been one of the Federal Government's biggest unfunded mandates, and expanding that mandate on States would only wreak more havoc on State budgets that, especially at that time during the height of the recession, were already struggling. Our former Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, said that the proposed Medicaid expansion under Obamacare would represent ``the mother of all unfunded mandates.'' When I was Governor of Tennessee in the 1980s, Medicaid made up only about 8 percent of Tennessee's State budget. By last year it was 30.6 percent. States paying more and more to expand Medicaid means having less to spend on other priorities like higher education, roads, and schools. In 2012, I said that over the prior 10 years, Tennessee's Medicaid costs had gone up 43 percent, forcing the State to decrease its funding to colleges and universities by 11 percent. As a result, tuition went up 120 percent over those 10 years. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the law will add $14 million new beneficiaries to struggling State Medicaid programs by 2025, at an extra cost of $46 billion to States and $847 billion to Federal taxpayers by 2025. Why is that so bad? I said at the time--and it is still true today--Medicaid's reimbursement rates are so low that only about one-half of the doctors will even see Medicaid patients and many of those aren't accepting new ones. It is not hard to see why expanding a failed program isn't good for Americans who need better health care. Another thing to consider is that States still haven't had to pay yet for covering the new Medicaid enrollees under the expansion. The Federal Government promised to pay 100 percent for the first few years, but starting in 2017--in just a couple of years--States will have to start paying 5 percent and eventually up to 10 percent in 2020. That may not seem like much in Washington terms, but it is a lot of money in State budgets. States may have to start raising income taxes or gas taxes or find some other place to find the money. Regardless of how it is paid for, expanding Medicaid puts a huge dent in State budgets. Does that mean less money for teachers' salaries? Does that mean tuition is going to have to go even higher at community colleges and State universities? Tennessee hasn't expanded Medicaid, but in its proposal to expand the program called Insure Tennessee, Governor Haslam anticipated an additional $35.6 million in costs to the State in 2017. In Illinois, Medicaid expansion will cost the State $208 million in 2020. In Kentucky's expansion, the State will have to pay $74 million in 2017 and an estimated $363 million in 2021. Governor-elect Bevin hasn't started looking for ways to pay for that increase yet because he plans to try to repeal it. If you look at the figures you can see why he is thinking about it. We were right about Obamacare's enormous impact on Medicaid and in turn Medicaid's huge negative effect on State budgets. Second, higher premiums. When my turn came at the White House summit, this is what I said directly to the President: ``The Congressional Budget Office report says that premiums will rise in the individual market'' as a result of Obamacare. The President turned to me and said I was wrong about that. A little bit later in the day, I gave the President a letter from the Congressional Budget Office showing that they predicted I would be right, that new non-group policies would be about 10 to 13 percent higher in 2016 than the average for non-group coverage in that same year under the current law. In that same letter, I reminded the President, that his own Chief Actuary for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services agreed with the Congressional Budget Office. You might be thinking that things would have turned out better than what I, the Congressional Budget Office, the Joint Committee on Taxation, and the Chief Actuary for CMS had predicted, but we all, unfortunately, were right. We were all right. Obamacare's premiums were and are higher for Americans with individual health care plans. We are talking about nearly 16 million Americans who purchase these individual plans. They buy these policies for themselves, and the cost of these plans is going through the roof. On June 1, 2015, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that nearly 700 individual and small-group health plans in 41 States plus the District of Columbia had requested double-digit premium increases for 2016. In Tennessee, the rate hike was 36 percent; in Maryland, 26 percent. On average, 2016 premium increases for Oregon's biggest insurer on the State health exchange will be over 25 percent; for some smaller providers, more than 30 percent; for South Dakotans, the will pay 63 percent higher premiums for health insurance through the exchange. The list of States experiencing health care spikes goes on. A recent report of the National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed this, going back to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which predicted in 2010 the premiums would go up. They said recently that premiums on the Obamacare exchange will increase by 6 percent on average every year between 2016 and 2024. Yet 5\1/2\ years ago, the President and congressional Democrats told Republicans time and time again during the debate that we were wrong, that the law would decrease premiums, when in fact our predictions, the administration's own estimates, estimates from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, all confirmed premiums for individual policies are going through the roof. Third, Republicans said 5\1/2\ years ago that Obamacare would increase taxes. It did. Obamacare added 21 tax increases to the Tax Code. That is $1 trillion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. A dozen of these target middle-income Americans, in clear violation of what the President had promised. Then there was our fourth prediction: Obamacare will cost jobs. A few years after the law passed, I met with a large group of chief executives of restaurant companies in America. The service and hospitality industries are the largest employers in our country. Usually their employees are low-income, usually minority Americans. In the meeting, the chief executive of Ruby Tuesday, Inc., which has about 800 restaurants, said to me--and said he didn't mind being quoted--that the cost to his company of implementing the new health care law was equal to or more than his net profit for that year, and as a result, he wasn't planning to build any new restaurants in the United States. An even larger restaurant company represented at the meeting said that because of their analysis of the law, instead of operating their store with 90 employees, their goal would be to operate it with 70 employees. That means fewer employees and fewer jobs because of Obamacare. More recently, another franchise business which has 550 employees told me: We have already begun cutting the hours of our employees to get well below the 30-hour threshold, and all of our new job postings are for part-time employees. This has a bad effect on the employer-employee relations, and, as many Tennesseans have told me, 30 hours of work isn't enough to support a family. Those lost hours are because of Obamacare. These are just a few examples of basic economics. It heaps costs on employers. They have less money to expand, so there is less money to hire workers. They heap on even higher costs. They cut hours. With higher costs, they lay off employees. We have seen all three as a result of the employer mandate that says employers with more than 50 full-time employees need to provide health insurance. What is more, Obamacare went a step further and for the first time in our history defined ``full time'' as a 30-hour workweek. I asked the former Democratic chairman of our HELP Committee: Where did that come from? France? Nobody knew where that came from. Full-time work in the United States has not been typically considered 30 hours, but it is in Obamacare. It is causing large numbers of employees to work only 28 or 29 hours because their employers can't afford to hire them as full-time employees. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that Obamacare will result in 2 million fewer jobs in 2017 and 2.5 million fewer full-time jobs by 2024. At least 450 employers across the Nation, including 100 school districts, have said Obamacare forced them to cut positions or reduce worker hours. What we Republicans said would happen years ago was this: that Medicaid would destroy State budgets--it did; that premiums and taxes would go up--they have; and that jobs would be lost--they have. It has all, unfortunately, come true. What did President Obama and congressional Democrats promise us about this law at about the time of the health care summit 5\1/2\ years ago? Were they right or were they wrong? One of the most infamous promises, which PolitiFact named--and I will use their words--as the 2013 ``Lie of the Year,'' was the President's ``If you like your plan, you can keep it.'' When Obamacare was fully implemented in 2014, millions of Americans learned very quickly that they wouldn't be able to keep the plans they liked. In October 2013, I received a letter from a woman, Emilie, whom I met. She lives in Middle Tennessee, and she has lupus. She was one of 16,000 Tennesseans who were part of a plan called CoverTN. She wrote me about her chronic illness. She said she was deemed uninsurable and that the only way to insure her was through CoverTN. She was glad to have that coverage, and she was glad to hear about Obamacare. Then she learned the truth: ``I cannot keep my current plan because it does not meet the standards of coverage. This alone is a travesty. CoverTN has been a lifeline [for me]. With the discontinuation of CoverTN, I am being forced to purchase a plan . . . that will increase [my costs] by a staggering 410%. My out of pocket expense will increase by more than $6,000.00 a year. Please help me understand how this is `affordable.' '' This was Emilie in Middle Tennessee. We could spend all day telling stories of Americans who liked their health care plans but weren't able to keep them under Obamacare. In November 2013 that looked as if it might be as many as 5 million Americans. The administration then did some last-minute regulatory fixes and lowered that number. But still, many Americans lost their plans, as Emilie did. The President also said: ``Medicare is a government program. But don't worry: I'm not going to touch it.'' The problem was he did touch it; $700 billion worth was taken from Medicare to finance Obamacare. I said during the debate in 2009 that Obamacare would cut ``grandma's Medicare to spend on somebody other than grandma--a new entitlement program.'' I said Obamacare would do that at a time when the Medicare trustees have told us that Medicare is going broke if we don't fix it. That is their job to tell us that. I said then: ``I think what they are saying to us is if you are going to cut grandma's Medicare, you ought to at least spend it on grandma instead of spending it on somebody else.'' Again, the President went against the promise he repeated over and over and raided a program that serves over 55 million older Americans. In summary, unfortunately Republicans were right when we said 5\1/2\ years ago that Obamacare would force spikes in State Medicaid spending, increase premiums and taxes, and hurt jobs. As right as we were, the Democrats were wrong. They said that you could keep your plan if you liked it, and they were wrong about that. They said Medicare wouldn't be affected, and they were wrong about that. Finally, we all agreed that health care needed to be fixed. So how did we end up with a law that was such an historic mistake? Well, one big reason is the debate over Obamacare wasn't really a debate. If it had been, we might not find ourselves in a mess today. The Senate Democratic leader then had a filibuster-proof majority. He didn't think he needed Republican ideas; so they didn't take them. They passed a Democratic bill. They voted for it; we voted against it. We sat here in a snowstorm on Christmas Eve when they had 60 votes, and they unveiled a bill filled to the brim with items from each Democratic Members' wish list. Along with our warnings about what would happen, we offered a lot of thoughtful ideas about how to fix the health care system in a way that we thought would lower costs and expand access, while making sure patients didn't lose control over their own health care. But Democrats also had a majority in the House. They had a Democratic President. They didn't need our ideas, and so we got Obamacare. So what do we Republicans have to offer Americans? Mr. President, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Presiding Officer. I will wrap up. I see the Senator from Washington on the floor. Throughout the Obamacare debate, Senator McConnell, who was the minority leader at the time, was criticized for not coming up with a comprehensive plan of his own. We told the President and the congressional Democrats not to hold their breath waiting for ``McConnell Care.'' Don't hold your breath waiting for Senator McConnell to come down to the Senate floor with a wheelbarrow filled with a 2,700-page bill of his own, because that is not how we believe the health care system ought to be fixed. We are policy sceptics. We doubt that anyone in Washington--Republicans, Democrats, Independents-- have the wisdom to fix such a complex system everywhere in America all at once. The wisest course would be to try to fix our health care system step by step in a way that emphasizes more choices and lower costs. This approach to health care reform is not something that Republicans cooked up last month. In fact, if you examine the Congressional Record, you will find that Republican Senators proposed a step-by-step approach to confronting our Nation's health care problems and other challenges 173 different times on the floor of the Senate during the year 2009. Some 173 times we talked about our step-by-step different direction for health care--almost none of which was included in Obamacare because they had the votes and they didn't need our ideas. I had hoped the President would listen to us and work with us at Blair House, emphasize more freedom, more choices and lower costs. But that didn't happen. We suggested allowing individuals to buy a health care plan in any State that meets their needs. We suggested reducing junk lawsuits against doctors, which only increase costs. We suggested expanding health savings accounts and other mechanisms, allowing individuals to control how they spend their own health care dollars. We suggested returning power to the States to regulate their own markets and lower costs. We suggested allowing small businesses to assist employees in purchasing the insurance and look at other ways to support employers offering health care benefits to their employees. We had specific legislative proposals to do these things. We suggested lowering barriers at the Food and Drug Administration so that innovative drugs and devices could get to the market faster and putting the health sector in charge of health information technology. We suggested insuring Americans with pre-existing conditions in a way through high-risk pools and other insurance incentives. And there are many other ideas that we thought then and we think now we could work together on in a bipartisan way to lower costs, to increase access, and to put patients back in charge of their own health care. This week, though, we are talking about repealing Obamacare, but for the last 6 years we have also been talking about a completely different path of providing health care at a lower cost to more Americans. Those steps were outlined in 2009, 2010, and 2011, and they are the same steps that we should be taking today. I have been saying since 2009 that the historic mistake with Obamacare was that we had deliberately expanded a broken health care system that already cost too much instead of moving step by step to create a system where millions of Americans had choices of plans that fit their needs and fit their budgets. The way we should accomplish this is the same way we passed Medicare, the same way we passed Social Security, the same way the Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, and in the same way--I hope and the Senator from Washington hopes--we will pass a broad reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the next couple of weeks. None of this is done by cramming a bill down the throats of the American people with 60 votes during a snowstorm on Christmas Eve. I renew our invitation to the President of the United States, and if he doesn't accept our invitation, to the next President of the United States. To our colleagues on the other side of the aisle: Let's forget about party; let's forget about this side or that side. Let's side with the American people whose premiums have gone up, who lost plans they like, whose Medicare has been raided, whose State budgets have been destroyed, and whose jobs have been lost. Work with Republicans in Congress to fix the damage Obamacare has done to health care in America. Work with us to replace Obamacare with real reforms at lower costs so more Americans can afford to buy insurance. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record my comments at the health care summit in February of 2010 and the letter that I handed to President Obama following our debate at the health care summit in 2010.