Roy Blunt

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I rise to talk about the new numbers that have been released on the President's health care plan. Yesterday the administration announced that slightly more than 4.2 million people have signed up for health plans through the exchanges. As we all know, that is substantially below their first goal and substantially below their adjusted goal just a few weeks ago. One of the things, in an effort by the Washington Post to find out how many of those people hadn't had insurance before--the group that was supposed to be served well by this--their estimate was in an article also this week, about 1 million people--an incredible amount of effort to add 1 million people to the insurance rolls, particularly with the stories from the millions of people who were on the insurance rolls that come to our offices every day; stories that clearly reflect problems with this law and problems, more importantly, for the American families who are impacted. I brought a few of them with me today--since I was talking about this topic last week--that have come to our office. These are stories where we reached back, contacted these people, said I was going to come to the floor with their story. I mentioned their first name and where they are from, are they concerned with that. Time after time people say, oh, no, we want this story told, which is why we reached out to you. Gary in Lake Ozark, MO, says what so many people are saying--that his deductible is now the problem. In fact, his deductible on the policy he can now have--let me just read what he said: Before I knew I'd be able to stay on my company's plan-- He was going to be able to stay on his company plan 1 year longer than he thought he was just a few months ago-- Before I knew I'd be able to stay on my company's plan, I went to the exchange to seek coverage. I found a plan available to me but was shocked to learn that my deductible was going to be over $8,000 per family member. This is quickly becoming the new group of people who aren't able to meet their health care costs. I met with a number of health care administrators, hospital administrators from Missouri recently. They said their fastest growing category of unpaid bills, of unpaid debt, is from people who have insurance. So many people with insurance now have a deductible that is a deductible they believe they cannot pay, and because they believe they cannot pay it, they simply do not pay it. So whether it is the $8,000 on Gary's policy or the other lower amounts-- hopefully, I will find some lower amounts here. Here is one from another Gary. This Gary is in southeast Missouri. His wife's deductible went from $500 to $1,800--story after story. What happens when you have that growing deductible, whether it is the $1,800 or the $3,000 or the $8,000, if it was $500 and that was all you were going to have to pay, you might figure out how to put together $500 or maybe even more than that, but when you see $1,800 or $3,000 or $8,000, apparently people who used to pay their $500 deductible say they can't possibly pay that, so the hospital needs to write that off, I guess, as bad debt. They are going to come after me for $7,500 just like they would have for $8,000. So a deductible that used to be reasonable and was paid, now the family looks at that and says we cannot possibly ever get to that deductible, so there is no reason to even start down that path. I have a whole list of Gary's here on top of this. I don't think they are all making up the name Gary. This Gary from Higginsville--I could have organized these to have a little more variety in the first three, but this is Gary from Higginsville, MO. They said his prescription costs for his premium for Humana Gold Plus Medicare Advantage and his copays have all gone up significantly. He is concerned about Medicare Advantage. Just a few days ago I was here--in fact, I ran into this person. Reading this letter: I am the man you spoke with outside Starbucks in Independence, MO, across from the mall. You leaned down on my car door of which the window was down. . . . He called me over to talk about ObamaCare. What has changed is that several of my medications have gone up in price . . . my premium has gone up for Human Gold Plus Medicare Advantage. My deductibles and co-pays have gone up-- Things that are the result of the cuts made to Medicare now actually cost him the money that used to be paid for by Medicare. When you cut Medicare $500 billion to start a new program, somebody who is on the old program is going to be impacted by that. It is not like when we debated this we said, well, this Medicare Program is in such great shape that now we can start a new program and use money from Medicare to do that. That was done in the face of the understanding that Medicare, one of the principal obligations the country has made to retired people--people over 65, going back to 1965--that this was a program that wasn't going to be able to support itself. So what do we decide to do as a Congress--and I voted against it and I am glad I did, but the ultimate decision was we are going to cut Medicare to start a new program, and we will see what happens to a program we already know is in trouble when we do that. Frank from Kansas City's policy was canceled for not meeting the Affordable Care Act requirements. So he was forced to sign up on the exchange for himself, his wife, his 22-year-old daughter, his 19-year- old son, his 11-year-old daughter. Frank was told that his 11-year-old daughter would qualify for Medicaid. He submitted three applications that they said they never received. After 2 months they asked him for additional information about his daughter, including tax information not available until April 1. Because of all this the Affordable Care Act is causing his daughter to go uninsured, according to Frank, until at least June. This is one of those States that has an exchange the States have set up. A couple of places have never been able to sign up one single person. It is not October 1, it is now much closer to April 1, and this system is just not meeting the needs of families or meeting the goals that clearly it set for itself. Farrell from Versailles, MO, says he is facing financial hardship because his employer cut his hours to avoid covering his health insurance. The employer told him ObamaCare was the reason they were cutting his hours. He was teaching at a community college as an adjunct professor for 8 years. He said he quit his full-time job because, according to him, he was teaching four courses each semester and a course over the summer and that appeared to be meeting his needs. Suddenly the new law comes along and his employer says: If you work as much as you have been working, we will have to provide health insurance. Something that you and I would both be interested in too, having worked together for a long time, is seeing the response that even local governments and State governments have had for people they always-- because they thought it was the right thing to do--provided health care. But sadly when the Federal Government said here is what you have to do, then that drew an interesting line across our society. It also means if you have to do this, you do not have to do anything for people who do not meet the requirement--the 30-hour workweek, the impact it has had on people. I was in a location the other day, and I said to the manager of the store: How are you doing, meaning I thought this would be a skill discussion; how are you doing with the skill levels you may need to find here for people who are dealing with customers. He said it is harder all the time because now we have to hire four people, where we used to have to hire three people because nobody new whom we are hiring is working more than 29 hours a week. So instead of finding three people to do that job to work 40 hours a week, now we are having to find four people who work less than 30 hours a week. He went on to say managers and people who were already working, nobody's getting their hours cut, but he said: When we are hiring new people, we are doing what our competitors are doing, which is hiring part-time people who do not have benefits. Emmett at Lake Ozark, despite the fact that he was paying all his premiums through his employer, his employer dropped early retirees from the company policy. He did not feel comfortable submitting his information to healthcare.gov, he says, for security reasons. By the way, nobody contends that this Web site is secure or that the information people put on it is secure. In fact, it is just the opposite. Every indication has been it is not secure. He did say he used ``the website to find a plan, but three months later, when I finally got a quote, it was unaffordable, and much higher than the quotes I was able to find'' outside of the exchange. Bob from Wentzville, MO, said he has seen his insurance increase by 15 percent over the past 3 years. I feel like writing back to Bob, saying, based on all the other letters, with 15 percent you should be feeling pretty good about that, but nobody feels good about a 15- percent increase. It is just that so many people are seeing an increase that is so much higher than that. On the other hand, his insurance premiums have increased by 15 percent, but--back to the earlier discussion--his deductible has gone from $500 annually to $4,000 annually or $8,000 for the family. Is this the kind of insurance families need? They used to pay a premium that was just a little bit less, 15 percent less, but they had a $500 annual deductible, not a $4,000 annual deductible. Beverly from Potosi, MO, went to her doctor for her annual screening and was told she could only have one now every 2 years because of the Affordable Care Act. Although her risk of cancer increases with age, she believes she is getting less care than she got before. Holly from Jefferson County, MO, is a registered nurse who is now working two part-time jobs. She is living paycheck to paycheck. Here is what she says in her letter: I am a registered nurse that is only working part-time at 2 jobs. I live paycheck to paycheck like most people since the economic crisis. I am barely able to keep my bills paid much less able to add another one. I am upset that my right as a US citizen has been taken away from me to decide for myself if I want health insurance or not. I think she could have added to that, to decide for herself whether she wanted it and what she wanted. I cannot tell what the President's latest announcement was, but it appears to be if you had insurance, even if it has been canceled because it didn't meet the qualifications, now somehow it is not canceled--and how you deal with that as someone who has maybe gotten another policy or maybe moved beyond the insurance you had and do not qualify to go back. I don't know how many times we can change this law without finally admitting the law is not working. Let's take everything we know now, which is so much more than the country knew and most Members of Congress knew when the law passed--let's take everything we know now and go back and do this the right way. Jason from Pleasant Hill and his wife purchased plans through their employer. Again, they experienced price increases without added benefits and in fact with less benefits than they had before. There is one letter after another coming to our office in various ways every day. I could stand here and read them for a long time, but if I read the clock correctly, I think my time is out and we are ready to move on to other business.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to talk for a few minutes today about health care and more inquiries I have from the people I work for in our State about health care. Like we always do, I followed up with them to verify that I understand their account, and they don't mind if I at least mention their first name and where they are from as we talk about these problems. This morning I had a chance to speak to the American Federation of Hospitals about the challenges we face, and I mentioned the comment I made on the floor a few days ago, which was: If we were dealing with this health care debate today, in my view it would be a much different debate. Every Member of the House, every Member of the Senate, and almost every American who has been impacted in any way by the changes in health care understands this a whole lot better than we may have understood it 4 years ago. I was in the House in 2009 and was leading our effort to come up with the alternatives that were clearly out there that I think we could have, and, frankly, should have pursued. But at that time it was clear a lot of Members had not really thought about this, and in many cases people who worked thought about it even less. We had a situation that, in many ways, was an accidental development at the end of World War II where most people in America who had insurance got their insurance at work. If the people at work liked the insurance they had, of course, among other things, they hoped they would be able to keep it. Hopefully many of them will, but clearly many of them won't. The letters I have today are reflective of all kinds of challenges people are seeing. One of the things that was working very well in the almost 40 States that had it was the high-risk pool. The high-risk pool allowed people who had preexisting conditions a way to get insurance. They were in a pool that was pretty well defined. Not everybody with a preexisting condition had an ongoing cost. You might have a condition that was under control, you might have had a heart problem or cancer problem or another problem that stood in the way of your getting other insurance, but it didn't mean you had a lot of ongoing costs. It did mean the high-risk pool was a place you could go. In our State, the premium for the people in the high-risk pool was 135 percent of what everybody else was paying. So you would take the average rate of what people were paying for insurance and add 35 percent to that. Remember, these were people who everybody understood--including them--had a preexisting condition. They had a place to go. If the new plan would have reduced that 35 percent back to what everybody else was paying, that might have been a worthy goal, but that doesn't appear to be what has happened at all to the 4,000 people who left the Missouri high-risk pool when it ended because of the new law on December 31 of last year. There was a transition for some of them. I have a letter from Bjorn of Kansas City. He said his wife was previously insured under the Missouri Health Insurance Pool for preexisting conditions. In her case she had a back condition. That was canceled in the middle of 2012, and she was put in another high-risk pool that the law allowed to happen as a transition. The problem that created for them was it reset their $1,000 deductible. They met the $1,000 in the high-risk pool, and they met the $1,000 deductible again in the second half of that year. The insurance they have been able to find costs them four times what they were paying before. It is not 135 percent of the old premium. I guess four times that would be 550 percent of the old premium. So somebody who was paying 135 percent of what used to be the normal premium for an individual is now paying 550 percent of what used to be the premium for the old individual. If that was the way to help people who had a preexisting condition, they better hope the Federal Government doesn't try to help them any more. Mark, from Parkville, says his two sons--young and healthy as they were, according to him--just had a 20-percent increase in the policies they had. The only reason they were given for the increase was that the new requirements of the Affordable Care Act meant their premium would go up. Mark said he lived out of the country for 2 years and was amazed to find upon his return that the cost for the same type of health coverage he had before he left went up from $250 a month to $1,000 a month. Bill, from St. James, MO, said his deductible went from $1,000 to $2,500. In Missouri, West Virginia, and lots of places, you and I know that if the individual deductible is $2,500, a family looks at that--that is just like not having insurance at all. If a couple of you happen to get sick that year, it is suddenly $5,000. I met with some Missouri hospital folks last week in St. Louis. They said their fastest growing uncollected debt was now among people with insurance. Why would that be? Because people with insurance suddenly have a deductible that is much higher than the average person with insurance used to have. The point they were making was that people can't pay $2,500 or $3,000 or $5,000 or an even higher deductible, so that part of the bill doesn't get paid. That is the new growing debt that hospitals have. These people who have the high deductibles are insured for maybe lots of things they didn't used to be insured for, but they don't use any of the things they are now insured for that they didn't used to be insured for. Bill from St. James says: ObamaCare sure has not helped us. I work for a small business that has renewed my healthcare and my deductible has risen from $1,000 to $2,500. My visits went from a $20 copay to a $30 copay and specialists from $50 copay to $75 copay. He says he doesn't understand how he is helped by the new health care law. Carl, in Lee's Summit, MO, said he has type 1 diabetes and his deductible went up to $7,500. Again, for most families, a $7,500 deductible is like not having insurance at all. If we could go back to where we had the health savings account where you had a high deductible and you had your health savings account and that high deductible would kick in only if you had to pay the high deductible--I never saw a health savings account plan that would not be cheaper than these plans that cover a lot of things, but they cover a lot of things a lot of people don't need. Carl says: To keep our premium rates down my employer had to raise our deductible to $7,500 with no prescription benefit until it is met, so now instead of putting away $400 per month for my retirement I have to spend it on insulin and diabetic supply's. How is this ACA helping any honest working American who is trying to take care of themselves and not rely on the government? Carl's point is that the money he used to spend to prepare for his own retirement he now spends to pay for his insulin and diabetes medicine that used to be covered--until this year--by his policy. Christine, from Kansas City, said her husband's employer was forced to make changes in their insurance resulting in a deductible that went from $1,300 to $6,100. If this had been the way we would explain this, that somehow--let's assume we are insuring more people. There is no reason to believe that yet, but let's assume we are, but we are insuring more people with what I have here today--a $7,500 deductible, a $6,100 and a $2,500 deductible. She says: Our deductible went from a manageable $1,300 to a devastating $6,100. I recently sent in scripts for my Dr and I can't imagine how much they will be. We were told they would be between $25 & $200 depending on the cost of the drug. Remember, they are all before you get the deductible. I have a letter from Fred from Columbia. He says that a drug company that makes one of his prescriptions no longer offers him a discount. The pharmacy told him it was because of the Affordable Care Act. I am perfectly willing to believe the Affordable Care Act has become an excuse for some things, and this may be one of them. I have not talked to the pharmacy in this case, but I do know these are problems other individuals are having because their insurance doesn't cover what it used to cover. Fred is a retired State employee and he said his plan doesn't offer as much coverage as it used to. Houston and Shirley from Peculiar, MO, have a supplemental health insurance. Their supplemental health insurance increased by $330 since the Affordable Care Act was passed. They said their policy increased $149--this is their supplemental policy. They say: Senator Blunt, we are on Medicare and have a supplemental health insurance. Our monthly premiums were a little less than $165 [prior to the ACA's passage in 2010], and now as of January 1, 2014, is $498.40. Our premium has increased by $149.55 a month. That is for their supplemental insurance. Just last week Medicare Advantage, which serves people in underserved areas--whether they live in the inner cities or rural communities--has had that competition reduced as well. I will say that if there were ever a time when we should take a second look at something--and the facts that every one of us have in our office suggest we take a look at it, and even demand we take a look at it--it is this policy that is hurting Americans and hurting families. If we had this debate again, the country, the health care providers, and the Congress of the United States would be a whole lot better prepared to talk about what needs to be talked about than apparently the Congress was prepared to talk about in 2009 and 2010. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, first of all, I want to say I am glad Senator Kaine has been here talking about this important issue today-- the tragedy of Syria, the tragedy of the barrel bombs, this hideous way to kill people where you fly over with helicopters and first terrorize people who are wondering where you are going to drop these weapons, and then basically shove them out the side door of a helicopter, and the Russian complicity in this. We are seeing even today that Russia is beginning to flex its muscles as it relates to the people of Ukraine. I had the Prime Minister from Georgia in to see me on Monday, and of course the day the Olympics were over the Russians were there the next day, more aggressively, partitioning off that part of Georgia they have seized in the last couple of years, the same argument they could easily try to make in Ukraine. Ukraine, of the Soviet satellite states, is the one that has potentially the most future positive impact on Russia, if they could get it back. The countries of the West, the countries of the European Union, and the United States should be aggressively uniting and trying to reinforce the desire for people in Ukraine to want to have economic freedom and want to have personal freedom, and sending the strongest possible message against those who work against that, whether they are in Russia or whether they were complicit in the activities of Ukraine. With this sudden moving around of Russian troops today, unannounced until just the last few hours that they would be maneuvering, it is usually no coincidence the Russians are moving troops around at a time of crisis on their borders. We should be very vigilant in sending the message of freedom, the message of supporting people who want freedom. My concern about Syria is that our policy hasn't worked there either and, frankly, our policy hasn't worked in such a way that it makes it hard for us now to say there will be consequences for Russia if something happens in Ukraine. We need to be sure the world knows, when the United States talks about consequences, that there will be consequences, they will be meaningful, they will be certain, and that things such as are happening in Syria can't be allowed to continue, and worse things, such as those happening in Ukraine, can't be allowed to happen. Health Care I came to the floor today to talk about health care again. I heard the leader's comments over the weekend--Senator Reid's comments--where he is referring to the President's health care plan. He said: There are plenty of horror stories being told. Then Senator Reid said: They are, all of them, untrue. All of them are untrue. I don't think anybody has come to the floor more frequently than I have in the last 2 months, 3 months, 10 weeks. I believe I have been coming to the floor every week, the 10 weeks we were in session, with stories from Missourians. We call them. We talk to them about it. We say: Senator Blunt is going to the floor and he is going to talk about what you have talked to us about. He would like to mention your first name, where you are from, but if you don't want him to do that, he won't do that. In virtually every case, they say: We told you these stories because we want other people to know. We want people to know how we are being affected by the President's health care bill. They seem to have plenty of facts backing them up, way beyond Senator Reid's assertion that all of them are untrue. They are not all untrue. In fact, I have every reason to believe they are all true, and there are many more stories out there to be told. Today I wanted to talk about the changes in Medicare Advantage and I had to have some discussion with our team, and they asked: Well, how many of these stories are you not going to tell this week if you just tell the stories about Medicare Advantage? If you are in agreement with Senator Reid's view of the world, I guess you think the active imagination of Missourians is running wild, because they are contacting our office constantly telling us about higher premiums, higher deductibles, insurance they used to have that worked and insurance that doesn't work, and it doesn't work because the Federal Government, without thinking through the goal of trying to be sure more people had access to insurance, didn't think about all of the unintended consequences. The latest broken promise--I am afraid it won't be the last; I wish it would be the last broken promise, but it won't be the last, I suspect--relates to the 15 million people in America who have Medicare Advantage--something they liked and something they are not going to be able to have, in many cases, the way they used to have it. This is another application of that promise of if you like your insurance, you can keep it. Well, all the 15 million Americans who have Medicare Advantage, many of them, are going to find they can't keep it. And before this is over, all of them may find out they can't keep it. The President's health care plan has already cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare--not to save Medicare but to fund the new program. Everybody knows Medicare is one of the great challenges we have going forward. How are we going to maintain Medicare? Only in Washington would you be able to get by with saying: Medicare is in real trouble, so let's cut it to start another program. This is the only place in America you wouldn't be laughed off the city council dais or off the legislative floor if you said: We have this one program that is in big trouble. We are not going to do anything to reform it, we are just going to cut it so we can start another program. Yet that is what has happened here. We have already cut Medicare by $300 billion--that is Medicare Advantage--and on top of this cut to Medicare Advantage we now see that plans are being changed, and they are being changed in significant ways. Why did we have Medicare Advantage for States such as mine--the State of Missouri--with lots of rural areas, lots of rural hospitals, without always having competitive health care providers? Medicare Advantage provided the competition. It was that competition that made Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D work and made them work at much less cost than anybody had anticipated. The marketplace works if you focus on a competitive marketplace rather than trying to run health care to be sure there is competition out there. That is what Medicare Advantage did. In our State, 1 out of 4 people on Medicare is on Medicare Advantage--237,000 Missourians on Medicare Advantage. On February 14, I joined my colleagues in urging CMS not to make any more cuts to Medicare Advantage. There were 40 of us who signed that letter, and 19 of the 40 Senators who signed that letter were Democrats, with 21 Republicans. So there is a pretty bipartisan sense that something must be happening out there to hurt these programs. That is true, not untrue. Why would we continue to do that? I don't know. So I have joined the Republican leaders in a letter this week calling on Secretary Sebelius to stop moving forward with these misguided policies that do things that impact people on Medicare Advantage; that do things that impact people who had health insurance with a deductible they could afford but now no longer have. The administration's proposals continue once again to contradict the promise that if you had health care you liked, you could keep your health care policy; that if you had doctors you liked, you could keep your doctors. More and more people are seeing that is not true. These many stories I have heard I firmly believe to be true, not untrue, no matter what the majority leader of the Senate might have said. Let me share a few of those today as I move toward the conclusion of what I want to talk about today. Darcie from Kansas City, MO, is a registered nurse and works with Medicare patients daily. She sees firsthand the effect the rising expenses on Medicare Advantage are having on people she deals with. This is a quote from her letter: Our seniors and other Medicare Advantage members should not, as they already do, have to make choices between paying for medicines and other healthcare related expenses or food or housing expenses. I hope you are able to see the bigger picture, as I do, as a 30-year-old professional nurse who is on the frontlines each and every day taking care of these individuals and their families. This sounds truthful to me. Edward and his wife, from Saint Peters, MO, live on a fixed income. He said: My wife and I are retired seniors living on a fixed income. I have Medicare Advantage, which is provided by Mercy--a Missouri based health insurance company. I am told I will lose coverage next year due to ObamaCare cuts. Why must the cost of ObamaCare--which Missourians did not want--be paid by cuts to seniors? Please change the ObamaCare law to leave Medicare Advantage alone. Again, 19 Democrats and 21 Republicans signed a letter last week asking the same question. This letter didn't even say: Go back and reverse what you have done. Just stop making these cuts being made right now. Ronald from Raytown, MO, says his copay has increased as a result of the administration's cuts to Medicare Advantage plans. Please protect our Medicare Advantage plans. As you know, Medicare is presently underfunded. I do not appreciate those that permit Obama to willfully take [hundreds of billions of] dollars that we seniors have paid into Medicare and use those monies to fund ObamaCare. I am counting on you to protect our Medicare Advantage plans and realize that the less government involvement in our Medicare Advantage plans, the more efficient the plan. As a result of ObamaCare, my copay has increased. My guess is Ronald knows whether or not his copay has increased. In speaking with him, I am certainly persuaded that the facts he is presenting--like the other people we are talking about today--are absolutely true. Jennifer from Blue Springs, MO, says: My husband and I are both on Medicare already . . . the co- pays for our ``Medicare Advantage'' plans have doubled and, in some cases, tripled from 2013 to 2014 . . . [and that is why I'm responding with a nightmare story]. The other thing Jennifer said is she and her husband are retired. They are musicians, and they had a business where they would go to nursing homes and play gospel music just for their expenses. She points out that because of the increased health care costs, nursing homes no longer have room in their budget for something that is entertaining, such as live gospel music. The reverberations of what happens when the government decides that the government is better prepared to manage not just Medicare and Medicaid--as if we didn't have enough challenges already--but 16 percent or 17 percent of the economy are seen out there every day. I certainly believe there have to be some people who are benefiting from this, but the numbers don't suggest that the overall benefit is nearly as good as the overall damage: people losing insurance at greater numbers than people getting insurance; premiums going up more than going down; deductibles rising. It would be nice for those who supported this to convince people that all these stories are untrue, but I think too many people have true stories to tell for their neighbors and their friends not to realize what is happening because of this government interference with a health care system that was working instead of doing the handful of things we could have done to make the best health care system in the world work better. They were there. They were offered. The President knew they were there. That is not the course we followed, and the course we are following is not leading to a place where most Americans want to be. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I want to talk a little bit about the letters I have received and the messages we have received in the office in the last week regarding the changes we see going on in health care. There was quite a bit of discussion last week about how health care impacts the workplace, and I think a lot of misinformation is out. The Congressional Budget Office projection, as some people have alleged, does not say that 2 million more people are going to have part-time jobs. It says the equivalent job loss because of the Affordable Health Care Act is the equivalent of 2.3 million people losing full-time jobs. That may mean that 10 million people who otherwise would have had full- time jobs have part-time jobs. The other thing is, it is three times as big as the number that was on the table when people voted for the Affordable Care Act. At that time, the Congressional Budget Office said: If this law passes, there will be 800,000 fewer jobs than if this law does not pass. The collective impact on the economy is 800,000 fewer jobs. Last week they said there would be 2.3 million fewer jobs--roughly three times the amount that the earlier estimate was. Similar to so many other estimates in this law, the reality of the law turns out to be different than the estimates. Surely that was an estimate that nobody wanted. I cannot imagine anybody who voted for this bill--and I did not vote for it--but I cannot imagine anybody who voted for this bill thought: That is a really great thing. We are going to lose 800,000 jobs if this bill passes. I assume they thought: The good this bill will do will offset losing 800,000 jobs. Now we find out it is 2.3 million jobs and all kinds of information that the good that was supposedly going to be done is not what people had hoped for. While we are talking about the workplace, I have a letter from a person who is the president of one of our community colleges in the State of Missouri. He says because of the Affordable Care Act ``we have reviewed all part-time employment to ensure compliance with the Affordable Care Act . . . which defines full-time as 30 hours or more per week. Without specific guidance in converting credit hours to clock hours, we have reduced part-time faculty's teaching loads to ensure'' nobody works more than 30 hours. This is not the only letter or contact all of us have had on this topic. We know the unintended consequence of this law on the workplace is that people are now told whom they do not have to insure. State governments, community colleges, big companies all looking at a law for the first time that supposedly says whom you have to insure--though the President certainly feels he has the authority that none of us can find anywhere in the law to decide when the law is going to go into effect and when it is not--but the law says whom you have to insure, and suddenly people who for a long time have provided health care benefits because they thought it was the right thing to do or the competitive thing to do now respond to this directive from the Federal Government that says what you have to do, and that means that is all you have to do. So all of these employees who may have worked 25 hours, 28 hours, 32 hours in the past who all got insurance now are suddenly working less than 30 hours. I have talked to enough of these employees to know this is not because they do not want to work more; this is not because they want to make less money; this is not because they want to teach one less class; it is because the law has had that kind of impact on the workplace. The other promises--we are going to get better coverage for less cost--surely, somebody is getting better coverage for less cost. But my guess is that is a much smaller group than the people who are losing their insurance and because of the so-called broader and better coverage have more costs. Here is a letter from Kathy in Wentzville, MO. She says: I carry insurance through a large corporation and my premium increased this year because the minimum standards [in the law] affect my plan. Premiums increased by 25 percent. She goes on, in no uncertain terms, to suggest that she does not like the Affordable Care Act or think it is affordable. Jeff from St. Joseph said: Thank you for the opportunity to share my family's opinion on ObamaCare. First off I would like to state that we have experienced increases in our health insurance. My employer's insurance has doubled of which I pay \1/2\. My family's separate insurance policy has risen as well with a cancellation due in December. I have considered canceling my [own] health insurance through my employer so that I could provide for my family's [health insurance at their new rates]. This is a family that a few months ago thought they were going to be able to continue to keep what they had. They liked what they had. They thought they could afford what they had. Now they are deciding who is going to go without insurance so other people can have insurance in the family at the higher rate. William from St. Louis, MO, says: My insurance was canceled in December. He says: . . . my insurance rates have been drastically increasing each year since the law was passed. Four years ago, I had a policy for my family with a $500 deductible and the ability to go to any hospital/doctor in St. Louis for $1,000 per month. Now I have a policy with a $2,000 deductible and I can't go to [the doctor I used to go to]. He says his policy now--that does not allow him to go to the doctor he used to go to--does not cost $1,000 a month any longer; it costs $1,500 a month. Ted in St. Joseph said his doctor has changed the way he does business. He says his doctor has downsized the types of plans he accepts and is moving to a customer base with higher incomes. So Ted's doctor, according to Ted in St. Joseph, has stopped taking patients with Blue Cross/Blue Shield because of increased costs, and Ted, who by the way liked the doctor he had, now has to find another doctor who will take the coverage he can get. Steve, in St. Joseph, and his wife are raising their 14-year-old grandson, and all three have seen their insurance costs increase--they think because of the Affordable Care Act. His grandson's policy went up $50 a month, from $104 to $154. His wife's deductible went from $1,000 per year to $5,000 per year and her insurance costs over $800 a month. He goes on to say--and I thought about whether I should read this; I assume they have talked about this too. He said: ``If we were to get divorced, her premium would be less than $200 per month.'' I think Steve is not suggesting that he and his wife should get divorced, but he is just talking about, again, the unintended consequences. A family who is together cannot afford to have the coverage they had. Her coverage is $800 a month, but as a substitute teacher--I believe that is what this letter says she does--her income would qualify her for a $200-a-month policy instead of the $800 they are paying now. Sandy from Armstrong, MO, says she received a letter from her insurance company notifying her that her premiums were about to increase. She went on healthcare.gov to find plans she and her husband could qualify for, and the plans she found were double the premiums she had been paying. Kelly from Farmington, MO, works in the HR department, the human resources department, at a bank. She feels healthy groups will be paying more for insurance because of the ACA and because of the expanded coverage. Her department has received many questions, she says, about health care coverage but feels limited in how much they can tell anybody because they do not know how the new law is going to apply. The law of unintended consequences continues to be the law that applies here. Missourians and people all over the country are contacting us and asking how much damage we are willing to do to the health care system that was working to get more people included in that system. There were ways to do this, every one of which I believe was legislatively proposed in 2009--small changes that would have made a big difference in a health care system that was working for people who were in that system. We needed to figure out the few ways to get more people in that system. Instead, we have had a dramatic impact on the best health care system in the world, and people are beginning to figure that out. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I rise to talk about the impact of the Affordable Care Act on the workplace. A report by the Congressional Budget Office came out yesterday stating that the number of jobs affected by the Affordable Care Act was triple what they estimated in 2009. At that time they estimated this would cost us up to 800,000 jobs. Yesterday they said it would cost us up to 2.3 million jobs. I guess those who voted for it didn't have an impartial observer tell them that there would be substantial workplace costs. Now that same group, after looking at the application and how the law is going to affect people, says there will be three times as many jobs lost because of people moving from full-time work to part-time work. This is another strong indication that the Affordable Care Act has not been good for the workplace, and I think we are seeing more and more that the Affordable Care Act is not good for most people. I am sure that out there somewhere--just the law of averages--there are people who benefit. I think there are other ways we could have reached out to those people and included them. I have some emails and letters that were addressed to my office that I will read into the Record. We verified all of the correspondence with the people involved. We wanted to make sure we could use their first names so I could talk about this, and I believe the people who wrote us--some stories are beyond belief--were well intentioned. John, from Farmington, MO, said he is one of the founding shareholders for his company and has been since 1975. They provided insurance for their employees and their families, but this year their insurance person came to them and said there will be a 50-percent increase when they renew their coverage later this year. In this small company, they are currently paying $12,000 a month and will be paying $18,000 a month. John says: We are a profitable business, but we are not so profitable that $6,000 a month doesn't make a big difference to us when our insurance premiums go up 50 percent. Lisa, in Baldwin, MO, said she is an insurance broker. She contacted us to talk about the examples many of her clients have had and the way they were affected by the health care bill. This is one of her letters: I have a family of five people--a husband, wife, and three children--who were paying $437/month for a Health Savings Account plan. Their rate for a comparable plan under ACA was $805/month. So that $437 this family was paying--if they replace that, along with everything else they are doing in a given month--is now $805. She says: I have quoted plans for numerous people over the last few months. All have lesser benefits than what they currently have and are far more expensive. She doesn't say ``some,'' she says ``most.'' And this is coming from someone who does this for a living. She said that in every case she has quoted, there have been higher costs and fewer benefits. William, from Desloge, MO, said that his wife had a pacemaker installed 3 years ago. He goes on to say: Recently, she called to set up a follow-up checkup on the pacemaker with her hospital. She was told that due to the budget constraints placed on the hospital due to the Affordable Care Act they no longer provide those services. According to William, instead of driving 10 miles for these services, they have to drive 60 miles one way. They have to drive 120 to 150 miles to go to one of the places located in St. Louis when they used to drive just 10 miles. The reason the hospital gave is that the Affordable Care Act has created that. This is a letter from a broker: I have a client in her late 50s who makes $20,000 and qualifies for the subsidy. Even with the subsidy, her premium was around $300 a month for the lowest possible level in the plan. I think that level is called the bronze plan. For the lowest level plan, her subsidy is $300 a month, and that was about 50 percent more than she had been paying for comparable coverage. Mark and Janet, from Platte City, MO, were informed in September 2013 that as of January 1, 2014, their premiums would double. Here is what they say in their letter: While we do not think ObamaCare, as it now stands, is good for this nation, at least it was an attempt to do something-- These are people who were hopeful about this and were still not critical of people who were trying to do something-- about out-of-control medical costs. It needs serious revisions and parts of it should be repealed. People in their 60s do not need maternity coverage! And mental health/ substance abuse coverage should not be mandatory either. That is the view of Mark and Janet. Mary Ann, in Scott City, MO, said she has had continuous health care coverage for 36 years without ever having a day without health insurance coverage. After being diagnosed with cancer, her insurance was canceled and she was forced to get insurance somewhere else. Why was her insurance canceled? She had been in the high-risk pool that the State runs. In 2009 I proposed other ways to do this and expand those high-risk pools. I think by the time the high-risk pool went out of existence on December 31, there were slightly more than 1,000 people still in it. I think we are eventually going to get 4,000 letters. What were they paying? They were paying 135 percent of the premium everybody else was paying. They had a high risk already, and they were generally able to go to the doctors they wanted. According to the letters we get, they are no longer able to go to the doctors they want. Doctors are important, but, frankly, doctors are even more important if you have been sick. If a doctor has been your doctor through an illness, that is something Mary Ann and others would like to have finished. Let me read one other: As of December 23rd, I was finally able to enroll. It's costing me more and I'm getting less. Unbelievably, healthcare.gov wouldn't allow me to enroll my healthy 18- year-old son. I thought he was the healthy young person they needed in order to make this program work. That may have been a Web site problem. The Web site will be solved. The President said the Web site is working exactly the way it is supposed to, so maybe that has been solved. I don't think the appeals process is working yet. I am told there are a lot of people appealing information that somehow wrongly got into the Web site. They can't get that solved. Mary continues to say that the ACA has been a disaster for her and her family. She says: Shame on us for letting this happen. I want my old insurance back. I don't appreciate being mandated at the last minute to buy something that has inferior health coverage. It is administratively inept and costs more. Please resolve this disaster before it gets worse. Myron, from Hannibal, MO, says: My company told me last November to go to my wife's group health insurance plan because they didn't know how ObamaCare was going to work out. On advice from an insurance broker, my company got me off their group policy. As a result, my health insurance premiums went from $198 a month to $549 a month. Natalie, from Meadville, says: My health insurance costs for my family of four have doubled and my benefits have decreased. I no longer have office visit benefits and my deductible has gone from $3,500 to $10,000. She said that she raised her deductible to try to lower her insurance premiums. She goes on to say: At the end of 2014, when we are forced to sign up for an Obamacare plan, we will probably cancel our insurance if it is cheaper to pay the penalty. I can't tell you how many letters we have that say: My premium has gone up and my benefits have gone down. There has been a huge number of people who have contacted us about that. Pat from Kansas City is worried about her kids, her oldest daughter, and her family. Her premium went from $5,000 to $10,000 a year. Scott from Lee's Summit says his premium went up 27 percent for himself and his son. He was told it would have gone up 7 percent anyway, but 20 percent of that 27 percent--or actually more than 20 percent--that 20 percent of the increase was because of the change in health care policies. I think the more we know, the more we know the kinds of things we could do to make the health care system work better. I would like to see us get back to doing that. Until we do, these letters are going to continue to come in, and we are going to continue to try to help these people find a better answer. But the government involvement here may mean there is not a better answer until the government figures out how to create a bigger marketplace and more choices and let people have the health care they think meets their family's needs. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to talk about the farm bill that will be on the floor--is on the floor, that we will vote on sometime next week. I would also predict that this is the last farm bill that will not be driven by the new realities of people who want their food needs met in new ways. These food needs are going to be greater, but we are going to be less concerned, I would expect, 5 years from now about farm surpluses and what happens if we grow too much than we are about how we meet the growing food needs of the world, partially because of population, partially because people, once they get better food, want the better food. Once you have got the variety of food, once you have had the experience of better food, nobody wants to go back to the food they used to have. We are going to see that driving this debate more over the next few years than we have up until now. Agriculture in many States, including my State of Missouri, is the No. 1 industry. Sixteen percent of our workforce is directly involved in agriculture. It continues in State after State where the Presiding Officer and I both hear that every Senator represents an agricultural State. I think every Senator represents a State where agriculture is a significant part of what we do, as it has always been part of what we do. Fewer people participate directly on the production end of agriculture, but, of course, everybody participates on the consumption end of agriculture. In America, agriculture directly supports 16 million jobs which are just involved in how we grow and process what we have. Farm families in Missouri, farm families nationwide, work each and every day to feed the country. More and more are focused on what it takes also to feed the world. For 2 years now we have been in a temporary farm bill. In some cases, the assistance that government has given and will give again with the passage of this bill has not even been there for the last 2 years. When I talk in a few minutes about livestock disaster, that program went away in 2011 as we were facing some of the most difficult times in a long time. The drought has been worse in many States than anytime since the 1950s. Programs that would deal with that have not dealt with that. But the investment in this bill will reaffirm our commitment to being at the forefront of productive agriculture. It will provide rural communities the ability to compete both here and abroad. Certainly, it is not perfect. I think while it may not be the best possible bill, I would say as I said 2 years ago when I voted for that interim bill, it is the best bill possible right now. As we all know, the leaders on the agriculture committees in the House and the Senate have spent a long time trying to bring this bill together. If it were easy, they would have done it quicker. They did not come back earlier than everybody else did during the recent break because they wanted to be back early; they came back because that discussion had not brought itself to a final bill yet. But this is the bill. It does some good things. It provides a certainty and a safety net for farm families. Very few farm families at some point in the productive cycle of a year do not have to go to the banker and say: We need to borrow some money to make something possible in this planning year that we could not do without borrowed money. Here is how we are going to pay it back. Well, ``here is how we are going to pay it back'' is a whole lot better if you say: Here is the safety net. Here is what happens if things that we do not expect to go wrong go wrong. Here is what happens if we have to actually use the crop insurance. Here is how we will pledge to you that we will, of course, have crop insurance when you make this loan. So this bill provides that and gives a 5-year place to look. My mom and dad were dairy farmers. I have some sense of understanding how farm families work and think. Knowing how you can look at the rules and regulations 5 years in advance is a whole lot better than looking 5 months in advance or 2 years in advance. We have gone through a period where farm families have not known for a long time now what the long- term government commitment to agriculture is. When we pass this bill, we are going to have that longer commitment for the first time in a while. This supports our export opportunities. It finds ways that allow us to get more easily into markets that the people in those countries want us to be in, because what we produce is something they need, they want, they know they would like to have. ``USA'' stamped on a truck, on a bin, on a container, is a seal of approval all over the world. This expands bioenergy production, not for the bioenergy things that are out there already in a proven way, but expanding bioenergy in places we know it needs to be expanded. This is the bill that we invest in rural communities. Eighty percent of this bill is now in nutrition programs that affect people in the most urban parts of our country and in rural parts of our country. But the 20 percent that includes the crop insurance and other programs--I think crop insurance is about 4 percent of the entire bill here. We see people who are critical of how government is doing too much to help farm families, although they usually say--they usually assume that all farm families are big corporate farmers. But just 4 percent or so of the bill is that. In the 20 percent that deals with rural America, it is things such as economic development that allow people to continue to compete and be in rural America. This gives our colleges and universities and the land grants principally, but the nonland grants who have an agricultural mission, the things they need, the tools they need, and research. I think researchers were trying to figure out how to be sure that our products are as healthy and helpful to the people who consume them as possible. That is good. This bill does that by securing at the same time some real cost savings. There is about $23 billion of deficit reduction because of the reforms in this bill, that which we have done in the past that we no longer believe we have to do for farm families to be competitive. I think 5 years from now we can look at this again and assume that the world marketplace allows us to look at farming in a new way. I would like to discuss a couple of important issues that are addressed in this bill. One is research; the other is livestock disaster assistance. In 2012, about 80 percent of the agricultural land in America experienced a drought. It was the most extensive drought in our country since the 1950s. In Missouri, all 114 counties were declared disaster areas because of that drought. Many with those persistently dry conditions were ranked among the very worst in the country. We grow lots of livestock in our State--lots of livestock of all kinds, particularly cattle, beef and dairy cattle. We have livestock, we have other livestock that is a little easier to both categorize and contain and know everything you would want to know about. But these industries did not have the kind of risk management programs they needed. For whatever reason, in the last farm bill, the livestock assistance programs, the livestock disaster programs--that is all they are; they are not to help in good times, they are purely to help in bad times. Those programs expired in 2011, just at the time when we had some of the worst livestock conditions we have had in over 50 years. So there was nothing there for those livestock producers. They were forced to liquidate their herds, resulting in the lowest cattle numbers since 1952. What does that mean, the lowest cattle numbers since 1952? It means we have fewer cattle, obviously. But it also means that the replacement of the herd is going to be harder, not as many mother cows, not as many calves. Beef shelves in grocery stores will reflect these cattle numbers for a long time because people had to sell their herds. In our State alone, there were 300,000 fewer cattle than there were a couple of years ago. It is the lowest number of cattle, in fact, single-year decline since the mid-1980s. It takes a long time to come back from that decline and have the numbers of cattle available for feedlots, for buyers, and eventually for the grocery store shelves than we would have had otherwise. I am pleased the farm bill makes these programs permanent, but, again, they are permanent programs that only occur if you have extraordinary disaster circumstances that make them occur. Thanks to smart investment in research, we have the safest, most affordable and abundant food supply in the world. We make smart investment in research. This is not a new commitment by the Federal Government. It goes back to 1862 when President Lincoln signed the bill that created the Department of Agriculture. One of the principal purposes for the Department of Agriculture was research that could be shared so that every farmer or every State or every community did not have to do their own research but research would be shared by the Department of Agriculture, encouraged by the Department of Agriculture, done in a way that met the needs of the whole country. Research continues to produce great results. In 1940, 1 farmer fed 19 people. This year, 1 farmer feeds about 155 people. By 2050, global food demand is expected to increase by about 70 percent, and to double shortly after that. The American farmer is the best farmer in the world at producing quality products that are desired to meet that growing food need. If world food needs double between now and some date shortly after 2050, that means we need to produce as much food in the second half of this century in any given year as we have produced--if 10,000 years of agricultural research has brought us to what we produce today, we need to double that in about the next 50 years. It is incumbent upon us to make sure we have the tools available to do that. As the ranking member of the agricultural appropriations Committee, certainly research has been critical to our committee. I am glad the farm bill authorizes these research programs and allows us to continue to encourage research that will enable us to do what we need to do to meet our own food needs and world food needs. Agricultural research lets us have more efficient production, ways to eradicate pests and disease. It addresses the adverse weather conditions the crops grow in. Africa as a continent is not in the food production role it needs to be, if by 2050 the projection is half of the people in the world will live in Africa. It is in our best interest to see them produce more food as well. Of course, it is in our best interests to maintain a safe food supply. Agricultural research can aid small farmers. We can see ag research that adds value to staple crops and adds nutrients to staple crops in countries that grow a lot and have a lot of it, but, frankly, it may not have much food value, even though it may be most of what people eat. The Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis conducts critical research to do just that, to look at a staple crop in a developing country and figure how that crop can be changed in a way that is beneficial to people who are used to it, who can grow it, but need to figure out how to select the best of those plants to replant next year. Research into nutrient fortification, drought resistance, disease, and other things is important. The farm bill takes that step. The chairwoman of the committee and the ranking member of the committee, our friends the Senators from Michigan and Mississippi, have worked hard to bring this bill forward. I close by saying again, I predict that as world food needs and 21st century opportunities for agriculture change, that is going to define the debate 5 years from now, well below what we are likely to anticipate. It is no longer going to be a world that is driven about how do we sell the crops we grow, it is going to be much more driven by how do we grow the crops the world needs and Americans need, and how do we connect that result to the market that needs it. American farmers for a long time have struggled with how productive they were in a world that maybe didn't need everything we could grow. That is not going to be the case in the very near future. I believe by the time we get to the end of this 5-year farm bill, we are going to have a very different discussion about how we meet our own food needs, world food needs, and the great opportunity in agriculture, agriculture business, and competition--that nobody does better than the American farmer. I intend to support this bill next week.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, last night in the State of the Union Message, the President looked at the Congress again and said: You need to be for my plan unless you have another plan, and suggested once again that we have never had other plans. I don't know in a handful of minutes that I can do justice to the other plans out there, but I can tell my colleagues there were other alternatives that were filed in legislation and that were debated in 2009. Clearly, today's experiences, one of which has been shared by a family from Wyoming, would be different experiences if we had looked at those other plans. Let me very quickly respond to the President when he asked, What are your ideas, and remind him again of what the ideas were that were proposed by people who thought we had the best health care system in the world but thought it could be improved. Some thought there were people who did not have the access they needed and there were rules that could be changed to make a difference. Here is what some of them are. One idea is to allow small business health plans. Most people get their insurance at work and they like what they have. Eighty-five percent of the people who had insurance last year got insurance at work and well over 90 percent of them thought what they had at work was good and met their needs. For years we have talked about ways to try to expand that so people, whether their association is the farm bureau or some other group they are associated with, where they can, through small businesses or associated health plans, get their health care plan that way, so they too become members of a bigger group that competes for health insurance through that group. No. 2, expand coverage for young adults. The President said last night that 3 million of the people have been added of the--he thought maybe 12 million; I haven't seen that figure yet. A few days ago Senator Reid said it was 9 million people, and a third of the people who had been added did so by staying on their parent's health care a little bit longer. That was the most uninsured group. The only person who filed that legislation in the House as the principal sponsor was me--to let people stay on their insurance. We said age 25, not 26. So I suppose the President added that 1 year to it, or whoever wrote the Affordable Health Care Act. But if that is right--I got the bill out the other day here on the floor--it was 3 pages and 4 lines. If 3 pages have solved 25 to 33 percent of the problem, I guess maybe our side should have come up with 12 pages of legislation and solved the whole problem. This was not something that took 2,600 pages that nobody understood. If we had that debate today, it would be a much better debate, because people have begun to understand how dangerous it is to deal with the health care of individuals and families. Medical liability reform makes a big difference in how costs and insurance are impacted and how health care is done. Increasing insurance flexibility lets people buy insurance across State lines. This is something that was out there as a significant idea that didn't minimize the choices people have, it maximized the places people could look to find out what their family needed. As to preexisting conditions, we had a system that was dealing with that pretty effectively if a person could get into it--the State high- risk pools. We talked about ways to expand those. Why would that be better than where we are now? If an insurance company, a government--if in some way an entity is making that high-risk pool better--they know they are dealing with individuals who had a preexisting condition. It is not necessary to try to structure everybody else's costs so they pay a lot more just in case people with a preexisting condition become an unreasonable part of an insurance group that an entity is trying to provide for. These programs have been closed as of December 31 in most States. And in every case we have been contacted on, people who had preexisting conditions, were in a high-risk pool, are paying more for insurance with less coverage and, in many cases, can't get their doctor. And these are people who had a preexisting condition so who their doctor was mattered to them. In many cases, they no longer can have that doctor. Clearly, I don't have time today to respond fully to the President. Whether it is high-risk pools that work better, wellness programs, preventing insurance companies from being able to cancel policies--that didn't require millions of taxpayer dollars; it just requires a rule that said they can't cancel a policy because somebody gets sick. The same as limits on coverage. As for encouraging health savings accounts, the Affordable Care Act eliminates one of the real tools that was working for families. As far as more transparency, how do health care providers do and how much do they charge to do it? What are their results and what are their costs? And income tax treatment so that everybody who buys insurance buys that with dollars that are treated the same way. If the biggest company in America can buy an insurance policy and have it nontaxed, have it tax deductible, so should the individual who buys insurance on their own. There are all kinds of alternatives out there that would work better that are not nearly as complicated and not nearly as expensive. The President needs to at least understand there are plenty of competing ideas. His ideas are not the only ideas that will work to make the system work better. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to follow right along with what my good friend, the Senator from Texas, was talking about. First, I would like to say, I think one of the philosophies of government was so well stated in such a succinct way by Abraham Lincoln at Cooper Union in New York in 1860 when he said: Government should do for people only those things that people cannot better do for themselves. There are some things in health care that government actually could do to then let people do things better for themselves. That is why our side, beginning in 2009--and before that--advocated things like buying across State lines, a bigger marketplace. Organize a marketplace. Do not try to operate a system. Do not try to create an environment where people cannot make decisions about what they want and somehow that we think the government can make those decisions better. As the Senator from Texas said, we all talk to people every day who had coverage they were happy with that met their needs, and now they are told by the government: Your new coverage is better. It does not matter if you do not have any children, you have pediatric dental care. It does not matter if you are retired and plan not to have children, you now have maternity coverage. It does not matter if you have always had insurance, this covers people with preexisting conditions. The American people have figured this out, and they do not like it. The system we had at the workplace-based insurance was largely a system that developed by accident after World War II, but, interestingly, 85 percent of the people who had insurance, got it at work, and 90 percent of them were happy with it. I think that is going to be the next thing we find out as we walk down the road: how many people are no longer going to get their insurance at work. But now we know the impact on people who generally did not have insurance at work or have insurance for the first time. I have some stories I want to share from people who have contacted our office in the last few days, and that is since I was here a week ago to talk about some stories I had then from people who were telling me. Just earlier today--additional anecdotal evidence--I heard from somebody who, at age 27, left their family policy to get their own, first insurance policy ever, with the biggest insurance company in the country. They went to the doctor they had always gone to, and the receptionist, the people dealing with her, said: We don't take that insurance here anymore. Then her request was: Well, I want to see the doctor I have always seen. Can I just pay cash? The answer was: No, you can't pay cash because we now know you have insurance. Under the new Federal requirements, you cannot pay cash to see the doctor you want to see; you have to go somewhere that will take your insurance. Surely that is not what we all really intended to do. Those people here who voted against the bill, even those who voted for the bill, even those who, like me, spoke against it, would not have anticipated that one of the prohibitions would be that you could not pay cash to see the doctor you want to see because you find out that your insurance does not cover your doctor. This is actually a step beyond: If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. This goes to: If you like your doctor, you cannot even pay your doctor to see your doctor, if the policies available to you did not let you see your doctor. But here are some letters I got just this week and some email messages and some text messages, but all from Missourians. Even though I am not going to give anybody's last name, these happen to be all Missourians whom I think my staff has called and asked: Do you mind if we tell your story, just in case your neighbor figures out this must be you if you are, for example, Christina from Lee's Summit, MO. Christina says she is a single mother of two. She is working her way through school as a waitress, working 25 hours a week. She previously received insurance through her employer, but she was not allowed to renew that plan, and now the cost of her daughter's deductible will go up from $100 a year to $2,500 a year--a 2,500 percent increase. As the Senator from Texas said earlier, some of these deductibles for most families are like you do not have insurance at all. I do not know what Christina's situation is, but I know somewhere there is a 25-hour- a-week waitress with two kids where if they are told their deductible is $2,500, that means they really do not have any coverage because they do not have $2,500, and they are not going to figure out how to get $2,500, and they cannot get insurance that makes that difference. Jeanna from Kansas City has a birth defect that eventually resulted in her having to have a hip replacement and hip revision. She has had health insurance every year of her life until this year. Her previous Blue Cross Blue Shield policy is no longer available, and policies on the exchange are just too expensive. She says: At this rate, we won't be able to afford health insurance in our current situation. I want to go back to the old system! At least I know I have insurance and that I have my doctors too. My primary doctor retired due to Obamacare. She says: I've always had health insurance for me and my family. After 2014 I won't. I wish that was an unusual letter, but it is not. Surely, there have to be people benefiting from this system. Just the law of averages would catch up with you. Somebody has to be having coverage they did not have before. Maybe they could not get in the State high-risk pool. By the way, we could have expanded those. That was one of the proposals I made for people who had a preexisting condition. The biggest challenge to reality, I think, of this whole debate has been that nobody else had any other ideas, that this was the only set of ideas out there. I brought a list to the floor the other day of the 10 or 12 bills I introduced as a House Member. The biggest one was 75 pages long. One that, according to Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, has accounted for a third of the people who went on insurance because they were able to join their family's policy--I introduced that bill in the House. It was 4\1/2\ pages. I guess if I had been really good at this--and that was a third of the people on insurance--I could have come up with a bill that was about 12 or 13 pages, and we would have gotten everybody. We did not need 2,700 pages of legislation, if 4\1/2\ pages get a third of the people who are now covered. Mitchell in Weston, MO, said he still has insurance. His premiums will go up over $40 a month. Frankly, that is one of the better stories I have had--somebody who still has insurance, and it is $40 a month higher. But he says: This ObamaCare is not the answer for Americans with [or without] health care insurance. This is a national problem now. He says: My health insurance is going up only $40.00 a month starting [in] January. But that is still $120.00 a week for my wife and me. He says: Most of my friends' insurance rates are going up $100.00 and more a week. I do not know if that is a scientific survey, but that is Mitchell's view of what is happening with most of his friends. Toney is a former owner of a hardware store. When he closed his store, he was not able to find insurance. Toney is from West Plains, MO. He enrolled in the Missouri State Health Insurance Pool, the high- risk pool. But when it was terminated, he was told to enroll in the Federal health exchange. I think he has finally gotten that done. He just says it happens to cost him more than it cost him before. Remember, the high-risk pool--here is what Toney says in his letter: When national health care became available the legislature-- This would be the Missouri legislature; I think this is what happened in most States-- voted to end the [Missouri High-Risk Pool] effective Dec. 31, 2013 and sent me a letter saying I should enroll in the Federal program. I began on the web site the first week in October and made some attempt to enroll every day thru October and November. I was finally successful in accessing the policy plans available just before December 1st. Here is another point I want to make too. The rollout itself has had negative consequences on the makeup of people who have insurance. I think there are many reasons why young, healthy people will decide not to buy insurance. One is that it costs them relatively more than it ever has before under the law. In December, in fact, if you were in your early twenties, you were paying about one-fifth of what someone was paying for health insurance in their early sixties. But in January, you had to pay at least one- third of what somebody was paying in their early sixties. People's insurance in their early sixties did not go down, but people's insurance in their early twenties went up. I just had a dad today tell me--and besides that, you tell young people--and you can get insurance if you have a serious health care problem because there is no prohibition if you have preexisting conditions. So if you are a young person, your insurance--this is the most uninsured group: young healthy people who think they are young and healthy and probably do not need insurance because they are young and healthy, who should worry about an accident. I mean, I am a dad. I understand how you have these discussions: Now, wait a minute. That does not cover all of your potential problems. But still, this is the biggest uninsured group. They are not signing up, and part of why they are not signing up--one of the smaller reasons, there are fundamental problems with the plan itself. But believe me, if you are wondering if you should get insurance every day, you are not going to do what Toney did. You are not going to be on the Web site every single day from October 1 until December 1 until you get insurance. At some point you are going to say: Well, I did not really think I needed this anyway. I am not going to keep beating my head against the wall to sign up for something that all of my friends tell me is a bad deal, and for sure is a worse deal than I would have gotten in December of last year because the law insisted it be a worse deal for young, healthy people. The White House said last week that the number of people signing up-- when they were challenged about the number of people signing up was not nearly enough, they said--well, I think the White House spokesman said: It is not the number of people; it is the mix of people that matters. I think the number they had out there is about 40 percent of the people who sign up need to be under 35 and hopefully healthy. That number is about 25 percent. So the mix is not working. The number is not working. The cost is not working. According to Shawn from Independence, his premiums for his private policy went up 40 percent. If he elected to drop his private policy and sign up on the exchange, according to him his premiums and deductibles would more than double, and he would not qualify for any subsidies. So for Shawn the best deal was the 40-percent increase. He had a more than 100-percent increase if he went to the exchange and higher deductibles. Lynn from Farmington, MO, says that at Mineral Area Regional Medical Center premiums increased even more than usual due to the Affordable Care Act requirements. We have increased the employee's portion of the health insurance premium in order to increase deductibles and copays due to the ACA-required new coverage that every plan has to include. Barbara at Fulton, MO--Winston Churchill gave the famous ``Iron Curtain'' speech at Westminster College in Fulton--says: Her husband's Blue Cross Blue Shield plan was canceled because it was deemed ``illegal'' per the Affordable Care Act. Her family--her husband and two daughters--is now paying more money for health insurance. My husband had insurance that he liked, and then we received a letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield that his plan was going to be discontinued due to requirements of the Affordable Care Act. They were disappointed. I was also told that my 4-year-old child should apply for state Medicaid and my 9-year-old child earned too much to qualify for insurance through healthcare.gov. They qualify for neither of those programs, she says. Because of ObamaCare, we, as a family, are paying much more for health insurance for our children and my husband is not currently fully insured. My last letter is from Scott in Independence, MO, who says his employer dropped his retiree health plan for 2014 due to increased costs associated with the ACA. I do not see here who his employer was. But we have seen big employers--IBM dropped their retiree health plan. UPS dropped their health care insurance for all of the spouses and dependents of their employees, in both cases saying: Well, now you have somewhere to go. You need to go to the exchange rather than the plan you had as part of being a retiree or part of being a spouse of someone who worked here. Scott looked at plans on the exchange. For a plan that is worse than what he had under his employer, he will pay 280 percent more in premiums, and his out-of-pocket expenses--guess that means deductibles--will quadruple; four times the deductibles, 280 percent for the premiums. He says--let me read one other thing here. He talks about being a disabled veteran. Since I am also a disabled veteran and exempt from the ACA, I went to see what my cost would be for a policy for just my 9-year-old daughter. Unfortunately, I cannot enroll her unless I enroll. So my costs will go from $159 dollars for a Cadillac policy, to $459 per month for-- His description. a horrible ACA policy this year. Essentially I was forced to buy a policy I neither want or need. It will cost me far more and provide far less than my cancelled employer plan. Bigger marketplace with more choices, more ways to ensure you can take your insurance from one place of work to another, more ways to ensure that expanded high-risk pools would let people join those high- risk pools. By the way, if you are an insurance company, you have to participate in that in some way, at least you know that all of the other insurance companies are, too, and everybody in that group is somebody who had a preexisting condition as opposed to having to assume you are going to get less healthy people than hopefully you get. I would just say that everybody in this country and everybody in the Congress knows more about health care than most people did 5 years ago. I think it would be a good time for us to take all of that new knowledge about health care and see if we can look at this again and do a better job. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, first of all, on the bill before us, we should be sure to continue to remember, if you are an employee and do lose your job today or tomorrow or in coming weeks, in every State you immediately qualify for 6 months of unemployment. In States that have high unemployment you immediately qualify for an additional 13 to 20 weeks. There are really two different debates going on here today. One is, is this really a long-term plan or a long-term policy? I suggest if this Congress and the administration spent the kind of effort and time on what it takes to create private sector jobs or encourage the environment where that happens, we would be spending our time much more wisely than we are as we continue to perpetuate a program that the majority would suggest should not even be paid for and many would suggest is just not a program at all. Other things that are affecting our economy is why I came to the floor today. There are a number of things, from constantly talking about more taxes to higher utility bills to more regulation to, obviously, this overwhelming discussion about health care. I noticed the majority leader this weekend said that roughly a third of all the people who have been added to the insured roles because of the Affordable Care Act were because of a bill I introduced in 2009 that would allow dependents or children to stay on their family policies longer. I was the only one who introduced that bill in the House. I don't think it was introduced in the Senate. I thought it was a good idea then. I think it is a good idea now. Apparently, it is such a good idea that a third of all the people who have insurance that did not have insurance before are just because of that bill. I have the bill before me. It was H. Res. 3887. It is 3\1/2\ pages that could have passed by itself--not 2,700 pages, 3\1/2\ pages that would have added a third of all of the people the majority of the Senate said had been added because of the Affordable Care Act. No taxpayer money involved; 3\1/2\ pages that would not have disrupted anybody else's insurance. There were other solutions out there that would have made a lot more sense. I am tired of hearing from the administration that nobody else had any other ideas. Apparently my idea was one-third of all the people who have been added to insurance, according to the majority leader. Apparently, I had a third of all of the ideas, and they were in 3\1/2\ pages with no taxpayer cost. Just as I suspect is the case with every Senator, I am getting letters, postings on our Facebook page, contacts through all of the social media every day, from Missourians who are seeing this is not working out like they thought it was going to work out. At Ozark Technical Community College in Springfield, MO, my hometown, the adjunct faculty there, as is the case in many community colleges, has taught an awful lot of the courses. I think 58 percent of the courses taught are taught not by full-time faculty members but by part-time members. The problem is those faculty members are now more part-time than they were before. Many of them were teaching 30 credit hours per year prior to this year. But largely because of the Affordable Care Act, they are now teaching 24 credit hours. They lost that percentage of their work, that percentage of their pay, that percentage of their ability to work with and be dedicated to students. According to the Springfield newspaper, the Affordable Care Act is one of the reasons that for those faculty members, 58 percent of all the credit hours taught are taught by people many of whom were teaching 30 credit hours and are now are teaching 24 credit hours. There is only one reason that they are working 24 hours a week instead of 30, and that is because 30 is the point where benefits, according to the Affordable Care Act, have to be offered at a level that is defined by the Affordable Care Act, not defined by the community college. In fact, some community college in America, I am sure, gave some benefits before for people who were part of the adjunct faculty, just not the benefits the Federal Government appears to think are absolutely necessary. Let me go through a few emails from people who reached out to our office in recent days. Jeffrey, from Blue Springs, MO, is a small business owner who offers health care benefits to his employees. Jeffrey said: It feels like a bait and switch. Get everyone to drop the coverage they liked, then stick it to them once company provided healthcare is no longer available. When I was home--as I was for much of the break we just had--I asked people: What are you doing with your health care? Employer after employer who doesn't have 50 employees and is not impacted by this is saying: I think the government is about to take this over, and before they get in, I am getting out. The 12 people at the dentist's office and the 36 people at the radio station either lost their health care January 1 or already know they are going to lose it next January 1, and the only reason is the so- called Affordable Care Act. Marsha, out of Auxvasse, MO, has three children who are all under the age of 5. Her husband's employer has been informed that because of ObamaCare, they will have to absorb more than $1 million in order to keep providing insurance for their employees. The employer is still trying to do that, but the coverage is not what it was, the deductible is higher than it was, and one of the messages is ``We may not be able to do this much longer.'' Sabra and her husband, from Purdy, MO, were notified that they will lose health care--and did lose their health care--on December 31 because of the health care act. She said: We live on less than $14,000. Now we are at a point where we have to make a choice, food or medication, both of which I can no longer afford. So I choose to go without the much needed medication. Theresa's husband--they are from Joplin, MO--lost his coverage on December 31. When she tried to sign up for health coverage at healthcare.gov, she was told they were ineligible because they were incarcerated. It turns out neither of them has ever been arrested or incarcerated at all, but they were ineligible because they were incarcerated. I guess the greater point there is that he lost his health care. She would not have been on healthcare.gov and found out--much to her surprise--that the government believes she is incarcerated if her husband hadn't lost his health care at work. Melanie, from St. Charles, MO, is a single mother of three. Her employers cut her hours because of ObamaCare. She is no longer able to work more than 28 hours a week and had to find two additional part-time jobs to make up for the job she lost. Here is what she said: I feel like the government is working against me, and I am the person they say they are trying to help. Jean, from St. Louis, said her insurance was canceled because of the President's health care plan. The most similar plan she could find in the exchange to the one she had before cost $775 per month, which is more than double what she was paying before the Affordable Care Act. She said: Why did we break a healthcare system that allowed people to find what they needed, instead of just government making improvements to it? Jefferson City Schools, which is in the same city as our State capital, said the health care plan will cost their school district $150,000. They have to pay for health insurance for substitute teachers, which they didn't pay for in the past. There are people who are listening to this who will think: That is fine; they are paying for substitute teachers. Many of those substitute teachers are no longer allowed to work 30 hours a week in school districts all over America, and then there are others in districts, such as this one, where it costs $150,000 more than it did. The district officials in the article I read didn't go as far as to say the Federal Government is hurting more than it is helping, but they did point out that $150,000 is about three full-time teachers whom they won't hire whom they might have been able to hire otherwise. Barbara, from Novinger, MO, said: For the first time in 50 years, my husband and I do not have health care. My hours have been reduced from 40 to 28 hours a week and they pulled out our insurance at work. Interestingly, employers who provided insurance for years because they thought it was the right thing to do and the competitive thing to do are now taking a different view of this when the government begins to tell them what they have to do. I think it is one of the most interesting applications of the health care law. When the government begins to tell you what you have to do, then suddenly it is OK not to do anything except what you have to do. How do you meet that criteria? How do you draw that line? You have people work less than 30 hours, you don't create new jobs, or you outsource your work. Let me give three or four more examples as I finish with my time on the floor. Sandra, from Springfield, is upset that her health care plan will require them to have pediatric dentistry and maternity care. She said: I'm upset that my health care plan will require my husband and I to have pediatric dentistry and maternity care that we do not need to have. I don't know how many letters like that all of us have received. The benefits are supposed to be better than the insurance they had, but for a whole lot of people, it turns out these are benefits they simply don't need. Suddenly, they are paying for benefits they don't need, and people who don't have insurance can have insurance once they get sick. How is that supposed to make any kind of economic sense or health care sense? Mark, from Chesterfield, MO, said that his plan was canceled because his plan--back to my point, I suppose--didn't meet the requirements of the President's health care plan. Here is what he said: My current plan will no longer be offered after December of 2014. This is a direct contradiction to President Obama's promise that I could keep my plan. Some people lost their insurance on December 31 of last year. Other people have already been told they are going to lose their insurance December 31 of next year. This letter is from somebody who works at the Ozarks Medical Center and lives in West Plains. We are a sole community provider, with the closest hospital providing the same level of care or above over 100 miles away. The loss of this healthcare system will devastate the economics of this community and surrounding communities. What we are going to find is a system that is not designed to meet the needs of the people of the country. What we could have done is we could have given them more choices to figure out what they need to meet their needs instead of coming up with a system that simply is going to leave so many people who had insurance 2 years ago without insurance 2 years from now. Surely that wasn't the goal, but people in this Chamber and Washington, DC, had better wake up and figure this out. Whether that was the goal or not, it is going to be the result if we don't do something about it. The best thing to do is to start over--now that we have learned all we have learned over the last 4 years--and make changes to the best health care system in the world that will make it even better and work for more people. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, today I wish to recognize Jackson, MO, as it celebrates its 200th anniversary in 2014. Jackson is a proud community with a long history of hard work and an unmistakable spirit of community. Founded in 1814, Jackson is the county seat of Cape Girardeau County in southeast Missouri. With only 300 residents at its founding, the town still supported five stores, two shoemakers, and a tannery--a thriving hub for the time. Jackson's growth has been slow and steady, but stable. Today, nearly 14,000 people live and work in Jackson. As it embarks on its 200th year, Jackson is one of the fastest growing communities in Missouri. Its city slogan, `The City of Beautiful Homes, Churches, and Schools,' aptly represents a community committed to progress and improvement. In 2009, Money Magazine named Jackson 59th on its list of best small towns in the United States. With the many thousands of small towns across our country, this is a considerable distinction--although, to be sure, Jackson is worthy of a spot much higher. Jackson's small town feel makes it a great place to call home. The citizens come together for events ranging from the annual Independence Day celebration in the city park, to its Homecomers event in historic uptown, to cheering for their hometown teams under the Friday night lights of football games. There are numerous other activities to keep Jackson residents busy; building families and friendships is at the core of each. The city of Jackson's officials and citizens should take pride in the core values of the community they call home on its 200th anniversary. Please join me in saluting Jackson, MO, as it celebrates this milestone.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I wanted to talk about some solutions to our health care problems that have been out there for a while. Every time I hear someone say: There were no alternatives to the Affordable Care Act, there were no alternatives to what the President wanted to do--in fact, I heard the President say that multiple times last week, though it might have been multiple reportings of him saying it the same time. But there is no question he said it, that there were no ideas out there except his ideas. That is just not accurate. We had and still have the best health care system in the world. But it was not perfect. It does not mean it could not have been improved. It does not mean there were not ways to create greater access. For those of us who have held concerns from the very first about the proposals we are now seeing play out in front of American families and before the American people, before individuals who thought they could get insurance but did not, before individuals who had insurance that worked who are beginning to lose it--when we see that play out and hear: Well, this was the only idea out there--not the only idea at all. At the time I was in the House of Representatives and proposed these to the House. They were not just bills we filed and did not talk about. In fact, a lot of this was covered very widely, even on occasion we had to have Republican-only hearings because the other side did not want to talk about these issues. They just wanted to talk about one way to solve these problems that I think is more and more clear may not be solving the problems nearly as well as they would have hoped for. There are a number of proposals that could have created more access to the good health care system we had, solved problems that individuals had. Bills that I introduced, that I was either the principal sponsor or the cosponsor of, one of those would have been to allow small businesses to band together in either what you want to call small business health plans or association health plans where people who had a common purpose could come together and figure out--actually in our State we allowed people to do it, the State of Missouri, to have those associated health plans, so your small group of 5 or 10 or 15 people did not become the universe of the group you were trying to insure, but you would have true access to small business health plans. I will be truthful. The insurance companies, for whatever reason, never liked that idea very well. But association health plans or small business health plans were one of the things--in fact, I cosponsored that bill with Congressman Sam Johnson, H. Res. 2607, if anybody wants to look back and see just how much we talked about this issue and how we dealt with it. Another issue every time the President's health care plan comes up: What about coverage for young adults? I was the only person in the House, as I recall--and I have said this a number of times and have never been challenged--who actually filed a bill that said: Let's let people stay on their family insurance policies longer. There are those out there since who have said: That expanded that too much. It was a slacker provision. It was not anything like that. It was an effort to take the most uninsured group in America--young, healthy people--and let them stay on their parents' health care. It was an effort to get--I think the number we talked about was around 3 million--people access to policies they did not have access to at some level. In virtually every State, you could stay on your family policy until you were 21. In Missouri, I think the number was 23. The proposal I made was let's add 2 years to that and do it for the whole country. Let's say 25. The President said in the Affordable Care Act, 26. I do not think I would have had a big fight about whether my bill that said let's let people be insured on their family policy until they are 25--if it was expanded to 26, I do not think that makes that uniquely the President's idea. That was a bill I sponsored. It would have helped young workers, college students. These are young healthy people, generally. It would not have added much. I think it is not adding much to insurance costs for families or those who are otherwise insured. The idea that somehow we could not do that--every time this topic comes up, there is somebody who will jump up and say: Do you mean you want to take people who are now on their family policy and who are under 26 and take them off the family policy? All we had to do to prevent that is pass one piece of legislation that may have been 40 words long--may have been 40 words long, may have been a couple of pages long. I know of all the ideas I introduced, the biggest one was 75 pages long. It was not a 2,700-page health care bill. The biggest of all the bills I introduced was 75 pages long. We could have done one or we could have done all of them. They would have worked. Some of these are on this chart right here: encourage wellness programs, reform coverage for preexisting conditions. We had high-risk pools that were working. There was a way to expand those high-risk pools so they would work better. We proposed that in legislation. I was on the floor the other day and talked about a young man in Missouri who is 20 now who has had an illness since he was 18 months old. He gets fluid on his brain. He had his first surgery at 18 months. He went from his family policy to the high-risk pool, which worked pretty well for him for a number of years and is working right now. But on December 31 the high-risk pool goes away. He cannot get access to the doctors he has used his entire life on any policy available to him. So we have eliminated the policy he had that was serving him well and the physicians group he had his entire life. We have eliminated that by eliminating the high-risk pool. Is that an improvement? Absolutely not. Could the high-risk pools have been expanded? Were there ways to do that? There absolutely were. Those were proposed. Medical liability reform was one of the things we could have done and proposed. In fact, even in the last Congress, I introduced in the Senate the Help Efficient, Accessible, Low-cost, Timely Healthcare Act, S. 1099. But that is very much like legislation that was available and could have become part of health care reform in 2009. The safety net to be sure that emergency room physicians have particular protections on liability because they do not have any choice but to treat people, that is another bill I introduced this year that was very much in line with what we were talking about just a few years ago. Insurance flexibility. In the 111th Congress I cosponsored H.R. 3824, the Expanded Health Insurance Options Act, which allowed people to buy across State lines through regional compacts, allowed States, if they wanted, to form compacts they could be part of that again would have been part of this solution. Reform coverage for preexisting conditions. Encourage wellness programs. This is something that could make a big difference and is something we could have thought of ways and did think of ways to encourage. H. Res. 4038, the Common Sense Health Care Reform and Affordability Act that Representative Camp and I introduced would have achieved this goal of looking for new and better ways to encourage wellness programs. I am not done yet. But I will say, every time the President or anybody else steps up and says there were no other ideas, that is not true. There were other ideas that I believed then and believe now would work better. Every day, as the Affordable Care Act becomes more and more available to us, I am more and more convinced there were better solutions. I am absolutely offended by this constant discussion that there were no other ideas. Prevent rescissions. We talked about legislation at the time that would have prevented canceling policies or prevented setting caps after somebody got sick. It does not take an entire government overwhelming the insurance marketplace to say here are two things you cannot do. The Common Sense Health Care Reform and Accountability Act would have helped achieve that goal--prevent limits on coverage, encourage health savings accounts, encourage people to have a little of their money that is available to them to use for health care expenses. I tell you what I am seeing happen now. So many people are now looking at policies that have these huge deductibles. For most families, it is like not having a policy at all. If someone has a policy similar to the one I was talking about on the floor the other day, reporting about a Missouri family where they were paying $1,100 a month for insurance and they had a $12,000 deductible, is that truly insurance? For most families is that truly insurance, $24,000 out of their pocket before their insurance paid anything? But it meets all of the better coverage supposedly that the President says we now have. It met all of those standards. It could be made available. But it had deductibility--as many of these policies do. We are going to find all of this out quickly. The only thing worse than the Web site not working may be the Web site working. Because when the Web site begins to work, people are going to have the facts. There is no reason to argue about the facts. The President continues to say people are going to have better coverage for less money. We are going to know in the next 90 days or so how true that is. I am sure some people are going to find better coverage for less money. I am equally sure most people are not going to find that. So health savings accounts; increased transparency--this is an idea which is actually in the bill, but they haven't pursued it, where you tell health care providers they have to give more information about what they charge and what their results are. This act passed 3\1/2\ years ago, almost 4 years ago, and it says in the law that they can require providers to do that, but nobody has passed that rule or regulation yet. This is something that would have helped. Most of the time, you go to the hospital, particularly if it is something you have scheduled, you are in the car on the way to the hospital, and knowing who gets the better results--or who gets the same results for the lower price would be very helpful information for most Americans and most American families to have. Reform tax treatment. This was another idea we talked about widely. If you buy your insurance on your own or you get your insurance at work, there needs to be equity in that tax treatment; whether you cap what you can get at work and allow that same tax credit if you buy it as an individual--there are lots of ways to do this. The point is that there were lots of ideas out there. I am persuaded that these ideas right here, which would have cost taxpayers virtually nothing, would have had minimal impact on the cost of insurance but would have had a lot of impact on a bigger marketplace, more choices, not fewer choices, and would have been a better way to go. There were ideas. At some point we may very well need to return to these ideas because at some point we may decide the course we are on is unworkable. Americans shouldn't look at that and think we have to go back to the old system unimproved. There are plenty of ways to improve access to the best health care in the world. Diminishing that health care system is not one of those ways. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I will follow up on what Senator Whitehouse has been talking about. Last year he and I tried to find the middle ground on this issue where Members of the Senate and the House would be willing to move forward together to try to deal with it. Largely, the potential damage and the potential danger of what the cyber threat means are both unknown and, if we do know about it, we don't quite understand what we could do about it or should do about it. So we are coming together here with Senator Blumenthal and Senator Graham to try to do what we can to have more information available as we move forward. There is no question that cyber breaches are serious. There is no question that they are a growing threat to our country's security. In my view, there is no question that it is our greatest vulnerability and a threat we might not see coming if we don't do the right things, particularly as it might relate to the critical infrastructure outside of what the government monitors. Cyber attacks by criminals, foreign intelligence, military service, and terrorists have increased in frequency and increased in what we see as the sophistication of those attacks. These are very dangerous for our country. They are certainly potentially dangerous in terms of the financial infrastructure, the critical infrastructure, the ability to defend the country. These incursions have already resulted in billions of dollars of lost intellectual property, millions of Americans have had their identities stolen, increased vulnerability to our critical infrastructure that is now so dependent on the cyber network for it to function. Also, of course, what happens to that infrastructure, whether it is the transportation infrastructure or the energy infrastructure or the utility infrastructure if they are compromised, and we don't know where that attack is coming from or how to meet it or how to prevent it, that is what we are trying to talk about in this legislation and trying to deal with. As early as 2007, cyber intrusions into the U.S. Government agencies and departments resulted in the loss of data that would be equal to everything across the street in the Library of Congress. Walk through the Library of Congress. Look at everything that is there. We have lost that much government data since 2007. At the same time, reliable information about cyber attacks and about cyber risks remain largely unavailable to consumers, unavailable to businesses, and unavailable to policymakers. Threat information affecting, as my friend from Rhode Island said, ``.gov'' and ``.mil''--the military side of what we do in the government and the nonmilitary side of what we do in the government--is largely classified. So we, frankly, don't have much information about what they are doing every day, what they are fighting every day, and what the increased threat may be. There are other entities people may be familiar with, such as ``.com,'' ``.net,'' and ``.org,'' domains that withhold information from the public because they don't want to needlessly concern their customers with using what is available or, in some cases, impact stockholders, if the stockholders knew how vulnerable a particular network might be. So I am glad we are working together to try to make this legislation, the Cybersecurity Public Awareness Act of 2013, just that. The two key words here are ``public awareness.'' We have looked at this long and hard to figure out where the path is that we can move forward on, not just to introduce a piece of legislation but a piece of legislation that our colleagues would respond to, a piece of legislation our colleagues will look at and say: Of course, we need to know more than we know now about this and, through us, the people we work for need to know more. This gives us a greater understanding of the number of threats and the tools available to repeal those threats without needlessly compromising any of those tools that would be available to repel threats. This bill works to provide public awareness of the danger of cyber attacks in our government and in private sector networks. It does that by instituting new reporting requirements for Federal agencies charged with monitoring and responding to cyber threats. Specifically, the bill would require national security and law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Justice, to submit reports to the Congress on what the attacks were on the Federal network and what the level of investigations are of cyber crime. What other obstacles are out there to appropriate public awareness of what they put on the Internet, how they put it on the Internet, how vulnerable we may be to things that happen now that manage so many of the daily aspects of our lives in the cyber world, and what we are doing about it. We want to know what the cyber security threats are, and we want to create an understanding so that there is a way to respond, so there is a way to share information, and so there is a way to make this work better. This bill includes provisions to enhance awareness of threats against our critical infrastructure. As I have said before, the critical infrastructure, whether it is financial, utility infrastructure or transportation infrastructure, all are things that now are so woven into the cyber networks that the ability to suddenly manipulate, the ability to infiltrate, is all there, and we want to be sure we are looking at those threats in the right way. It is clearly complex. There is somebody out there right now thinking about things that we wouldn't want them to think about as to how they can manipulate and use these networks in dangerous ways. It is complex, and it is critical to our national security challenges. Our response cannot and should not be to break down on partisan lines. It should not be a response that we decide we can't do anything because we can't figure out how to work together. Again, I am pleased to be working with my colleagues on this issue. Senator Blumenthal and Senator Whitehouse both have backgrounds as attorneys general of their States and understand the importance of both honoring and enforcing the law and protecting us in this new area of vulnerability. We can't prevent cyber security threats, but we can respond to those threats; however, in my view, we can't really respond to those threats--and in the view of I think everybody who will be speaking about this issue today--without public support. Having more information will make a difference. Understanding how big this problem is will make a difference. Working together to try to solve it is absolutely essential. I believe this is our greatest vulnerability as a society, and it is a vulnerability that will increase over time or decrease over time, and that largely is up to how we deal with it. Again, I am glad to join my colleagues, and I look forward to hearing what Senator Blumenthal has to say about this, and I appreciate the important background he brings to this debate. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to conclude our comments--at least my comments here--by saying we all believe that greater awareness of the size of this problem and the effort that is being made every day to deal with it will create an important set of information as we move forward. This is a piece of legislation that is really focused on providing information, not in enough detail to weaken our efforts but enough information so people know this is not a casual conversation, that the cyber threat is real, that we are responding to it all the time, and, frankly, Members of Congress need to have even more information than we have on how much intensity, how much time, how much response is being made. I say to Senator Whitehouse, thanks for bringing us together.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I wish to speak about where we are right now. We are moving toward confirming a number of individuals with the majority deciding that the majority could do that by themselves. Apparently, they had the right to change the rules, which I guess means there really are no rules and the majority can change the rules any day they want. What we are seeing now with the health care implementation is what happens, frankly, when one side decides they don't want to make any effort necessary to get even one other person from the other side to agree with them on moving forward with something as big as the health care legislation. That should have been an example to us, but apparently the example was the example that they, the majority, can do whatever the majority wants to do. Let me share for a few minutes some of the things I am hearing in our office from people who are contacting us to tell us the problems they are having that they didn't anticipate. This is a letter from Pam from Chesterfield, MO. She says: My husband and I have always played by the rules and carried insurance. I had no idea we were going to have to change plans and go to the exchange, but our provider apparently doesn't want to have individual plans any longer because it is too costly to figure out the complexities that would apply to individual plans. Then Pam says: At least for now, my husband and I are not getting health insurance, and I guess we have to hope for the best. What a mess, she says. So much for playing by the rules. I never expected the two of us to be uninsured. But, now, she thinks that is what is likely to happen. Jennifer, a college student from St. Louis said that she initially supported the Affordable Care Act. She worked part-time at a Home Goods store where she had what she thought were great health benefits--or at least the health benefits she wanted--and where she could work as many hours as she wanted. But, she says, because of the health care plan, her employer reduced the maximum number of hours she could work to 24 hours. So, she says: My name is Jennifer, a hard-working student from St. Louis, MO, and I would like to share my emerging problems. At first I was supportive of the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act. Insurance for everyone--that sounds so appealing, but now that it has affected my life in a negative way, I am not so sure I can be supportive anymore. I have worked for my employer for almost 3 years while going to school. It has been an excellent place to work until now, and now not only do I not have the health care benefits I had before, but I am not able to work as much as I was able to work before. Carla and her husband are farmers from Oreck, MO. They farm full- time; neither of them is employed off the farm. They have two sons, one just graduated from college and just went to work; another is a junior in college. They have one full-time employee on the farm. Her family provides their own insurance. In order for them to have insurance they have had a health savings account through Humana. Their deductible is $10,000, and they still pay a little over $500 a month or $6,057 a year for their family insurance. But she tells me beginning January 1, 2014, their deductible goes to $12,600. Their premium goes to $11,422, an 89- percent increase in a family that provides their own insurance. By the way, they provide insurance with dollars they earned and they pay taxes on, so we can add another premium to that and find out how this family, that has done all they could to have insurance for their family, now has an 89-percent increase in their insurance and a deductible they hope they never use. But if they do, it is a big problem if they use that deductible. The deductible is going to be over $12,000. If a family is paying $11,000 for premiums and then they develop health care needs, they pay another $12,000 before their insurance helps them, that is $23,000 a year before their insurance benefits them in any way for a family that had insurance coverage that, until right now, they thought was working for them while doing all they could to have it. Catherine from Springfield, MO, says a few weeks ago she was informed she was going to lose her health coverage because of the President's health care plan. She has been concerned that she might not be able to sign up because the Web site wasn't working. Whether the insurance costs more or not wasn't as big of a concern to her as having insurance. She says: The nightmare that is ObamaCare is going to affect us in a major way, and the stress of what is coming is affecting many people. Not only are we losing health insurance plans we liked, and possibly the doctors we trust, but the new coverage is not as good and it costs us more. This is--to paraphrase the Vice President, ``a big deal'', she says. Ken writes: Dear Senator Blunt. I am writing to inform you of my recent experience with health insurance and the ACA. My wife and I make a decent income but are far from wealthy. On September 30 I received a notice that due to the ACA, my employer- sponsored health insurance plan would no longer be available. Yesterday--after worrying about this since September 30, apparently--yesterday, he continues--I discovered that my employer was able to renegotiate an early renewal and our monthly premium will only increase by 12.5 percent. However-- by the way, 12.5 percent is a pretty good increase by my books except the ones that compare what is happening right now. However, he continues, I have been made aware that next year my plan premiums will increase by a minimum of 39 percent. So it increased 12.5 percent this year, and they have already notified this family that their increase will be a minimum of 39 percent next year, and his deductible, according to him, will double. So reading his letter further, he says: So I guess I will not be able to keep my insurance and my costs will not decrease as the President said they would. Carol from Republic, MO, says her monthly premiums have gone from $600 to $800, and the part-time jobs she and her husband both had at the local community college have actually gone down because they are not able to teach as much as they were able to teach before, because the community college has decided they can't let any of their part-time faculty work more than 30 hours. So their income went down, their expenses went up, in both cases because of the President's decisions on health care and the legislative decisions on health care in both cases. We know this has impacted the workplace, part-time workers, people holding their workforce down so they wouldn't be covered, holding their worker hours down so they wouldn't have to pay the penalty if they didn't offer insurance or offer the insurance for the first time at levels they hadn't had before. Now we are also seeing--not only did the hours of work go down, but the cost of health insurance goes up. Surely, we can come up with a better plan than that. Christian from St. Peter's, MO, just learned that his wife's employer will start excluding him from their family coverage and that he now has to receive insurance in some different way. It looks like he is going to be able to do that with his employer for $1,300 more per year. This is actually the best story I have told so far--only $1,300 that this family used to have to spend for something else, and they are now spending for health care. He says: I am not sure who ObamaCare benefits, but it sure isn't my family. These stories are just examples of some of the things we are hearing. Last weekend I noticed that one of the architects of the President's health care bill, Dr. Zeke Emanuel, on Fox News to Chris Wallace, said that what the President really should have said--and this is his exact quote: ``If you want to pay more for your insurance company that covers your doctor, you can do that.'' I don't know what he is looking at, and some may be able to find their doctor for more money, but in our State some of the health care providers aren't on the exchange. I read the other day that more than half of the hospitals in New Hampshire aren't on the exchange. So if your doctor happened to work for more than half of the hospitals in New Hampshire, there is no amount of money you can pay on the exchange and keep your doctor, because your doctor is no longer available through the way that you are told by the health care act that you can get insurance as an individual. The President promised that. He said: My plan begins by covering every American. If you already like your health insurance, the only thing that will change for you under this part is the amount of money you will spend on premiums, and that will be less. I think we are going to quickly see not only are people losing insurance, but for most people the premiums are not going to be less and the deductibles are going to be higher, not lower. This is going to be a story that is going to affect American families as nothing the Federal Government has done in a long time, and maybe nothing the Federal Government has done ever. If you truly want to impact the lives of families, impact their health care. Somebody told me one time: When everybody in your family is well, you have lots of problems. When somebody in your family is sick, you have one problem. We are dealing with the one focusing problem for American families: their access to health care that they can afford with decisions they like. I yield back.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I wish to share a couple letters I received just today. I was talking earlier in the day on some of these situations and again what happens when one side thinks they can do whatever they want to do and the consequences of that. This letter is from Paul from East Prairie, MO, in the Missouri bootheel: Upon hearing the potential changes coming January 1st, I decided to investigate the stories I heard. I learned that in 2014 my family's premium would go from $597/mo with two $5000 deductibles to $1119/mo with two $4300 deductibles. My cheapest option is $1,085.00/mo with a $12,700 deductible. Not only was this unaffordable, it was pointless to have insurance. Certainly, I agree with that. If your deductible is $12,700 and you are paying over $1,000 every month to get insurance, what is that? It is certainly not affordable health care. Here is a letter from Tom in St. Louis, who said: My company is a great company to work for, but unfortunately our health insurance policy went from $490 to $690/month. That is $200/month that I can't put towards my kids' education. That is a lot of money for a working guy to come up with every month. My co-workers are struggling with this increase too. I will look into all the options available and hope we do not have doctor changes. We are familiar with the plan we had and we liked it. A third one from Sherri in Holts Summit, MO. She had a preexisting condition and was in the high-risk pool. She said: I saw the price, the co-pays and the deductibles and I can't afford it. So it looks like I will suffer on and have even less money while having a policy I won't be able to afford to use. We are getting those letters every hour of every day. I think it is not what the American people thought they were going to get.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. I want to talk a few minutes about what is happening with health care. I came to the floor last week to talk about individuals who were having problems. People are contacting our office. In fact, I suspect they are contacting 100 Senate offices every day expressing their concerns as they lose insurance. At least 4.2 million Americans have now received cancellation notices on the insurance they had. I know last week the President made his proposal that apparently you could keep the insurance you like for 1 year if your insurance company will still offer it and if the State insurance commissioner will approve it. But those are two pretty big ifs and certainly nowhere close to ``you can keep your insurance if you like it, period. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, period.'' Neither of those is going to turn out to be the case. In fact, insurance commissioners immediately--their organization--said this is going to be practically very hard to comply with. So it is one of many problems. I think the law that is most likely to apply with the Affordable Care Act will be the law of unintended consequences--consequences for individuals, consequences for people who had preexisting conditions and who in 35 States were being well served by something called the high- risk pool. Virtually all of those high-risk pools go out of existence on December 31. I know the Missouri high-risk pool goes out of existence on December 31, and the 4,300 people who depend on that for their insurance now have to find insurance on their own. They can get insurance through the exchange, but in all cases I have heard of so far, they will be paying more for their insurance on January 1 than they are paying for coverage today or will pay through the end of this year. So much for helping people with preexisting conditions. There was certainly a way to extend those high-risk pools, but we didn't do that. This week I had a number of businesses talking about the problems they are having. I would like to briefly talk about two of them this morning. One of them is the Older Adults Transportation System in our State. It is headquartered near the middle of the State in Columbia, MO. It provides transportation for seniors, for people who are disabled, for low-income Missourians. Like many, the Older Adults Transportation System--called OATS--was notified that their current plan would be canceled on January 1. The rate for their new policy for their 50 full-time employees is going to be 40 percent higher on January 1 than the policy they have until December 31, and the only way they can do anything about that is to provide fewer services. So because of that 40-percent increase, fewer trips will be available to take the people they serve. Surely that wasn't the goal of the health care plan. They wanted to insure their driving staff. There are 600 drivers in that system; they wanted to insure them. They were actually hopeful, with all the promises about the Affordable Care Act, that they would be able to add their driving staff. Instead of adding their driving staff, they have to figure out what they are going to do with the 50 employees they have been insuring at rates that are now 40 percent higher than they were before. Businesses around the State are calling. I recently heard from McArthur's Bakery in St. Louis. They currently have a 9-percent cap on a 2-year health policy. It is a qualified plan. Randy, the president of McArthur's Bakery, believes they have a pretty good plan. He thought their plan was a plan that should meet any standard they would hope to meet. It wasn't a rich plan. He described it to me as not a Cadillac plan but at least an Impala plan, and they thought the Impala was what they could do. Suddenly they have learned there is going to be a 4.4- percent increase in fees and taxes and a huge increase in the deductible. Their current plan has a deductible of about $500 for an individual and $1,250 for a family. The deductible on the new plan is going to be about $3,500 for an individual and $10,000 to $12,000 for a family. That is what I am hearing all the time, that the coverage may be broader, there may be things covered that didn't used to be covered, but the deductible is now so big that the plan people thought protected their needs doesn't really protect their needs. For most families, $12,000 is catastrophic. It doesn't take $120,000 or $500,000 to be catastrophic; $12,000 is catastrophic. If that becomes your new deductible year after year, you will have a problem you didn't have when your deductible was $1,200. Randy McArthur says: The very thing that ObamaCare was supposed to do was to protect the working people--to give them access to affordable insurance--but it's actually doing the exact opposite. Instead, this law will mandate coverage for things you will have to pay for that you didn't have to pay for before and apparently will offset that by being sure you pay a lot more of your own money up front. I think we are going to continue to see these problems develop. I hope we can find ways to fix that. I introduced a number of bills in 2009 that I thought were better alternatives than this one. We may have to go back and start all over. But right now, the one thing we do know is that the law of unintended consequences appears to be hitting a lot of families and hitting a lot of families very hard. Madam President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that floor privileges be granted to Maj. Mike Shirley, a U.S. Air Force officer, who is currently serving as our Defense Legislative Fellow in my office, and to Robert Temple, an intern on my staff, for the duration of the consideration of S. 1197, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. I thank Senator McCaskill, my colleague from Missouri, and Senator Gillibrand both for the effort, the time, the commitment, the focus they have made on this issue. They have clearly both been at the frontlines of changing the underlying bill. There are two things Senator Gillibrand said that I absolutely agree with. The underlying bill is strong. It is a step in the right direction. It is the result of our committee debate, our committee action. I think I heard the Senator from New York say she was supporting the McCaskill amendment which adds even additional strength to that. I also am supporting that amendment. I think it does make the bill even stronger. It says the commanders will be evaluated based on this as one of the factors; that no longer would this just be something if it happens to come up you talk about it, but the commanders will be evaluated based on what they did to change the command atmosphere, what they did to protect people against sexual assault, what they did to create an atmosphere where these things not only do not happen, but when they do happen, they are vigorously dealt with and looked to as something that has to be dealt with, and the commander should be evaluated in that way. There is another layer of review in the McCaskill amendment. If the commander disagrees with something that has happened in this process, they have to kick that review up another level. The so-called good soldier defense is no longer a defense. This is about this incident, this assault, this accusation, and dealt with solely in that way because of this additional amendment that I think many of us will support that will be added to what is already a strong underlying bill. Also, this amendment would allow victims to express a preference, whether they would have this pursued in a civilian trial or in a military trial, a court-martial. Those are all good additions. I think that is why--not only why Senator McCaskill proposed them, but the Senator from New York and I would be supporting that amendment. I believe the amendment improves what the committee did. But I think the committee had a full debate and a long debate and a vigorous debate on how important it is the commanders be involved. Senator McCaskill, my colleague from Missouri, has been a leader on this all her time in the Senate. When she came to the Senate, one of the things in her background was her work as a county prosecutor and, more specifically, a prosecutor for sexual assault cases. I have relied on her judgment as we looked at these issues, and I think her judgment is borne out by so many things we heard in the committee. Senator Ayotte will be speaking in support of the McCaskill amendment and underlying bill. Senator Fischer, a member of the Armed Services Committee, will also be part of that debate. The Armed Services Committee introduced a bill that has the most comprehensive legislation targeting sexual assault that has ever been considered by the Congress. We added to that amendment these important elements of another McCaskill amendment. There are 26 provisions in the underlying bill which deal with this issue. It was among the most difficult decisions I think we met, but also one of the most important decisions we met: the idea that commanders would have responsibility for the atmosphere they create. One of the things that was mentioned more than once was the integration of the Armed Forces. I stand by Senator Truman's desk, one of our predecessors in this Senate from Missouri. He signed the order that integrated the Armed Forces. President Eisenhower pursued that further, but only when the command structure was given absolute responsibility to deal with what had become a real problem. There were even race riots on ships, according to Senator McCain, who talked to us about this issue. It was when the commanders were given the responsibility to see that this problem was solved that it was solved. I think this bill, and the additional amendment I will be supporting, the McCaskill amendment, clarifies in new ways how important it is that commanders accept this as part of their command responsibility. The numbers Senator Gillibrand talked about are totally unacceptable. One of the things commanders will be evaluated on in the future will be what they did about changing that environment. In my view, taking them out of the command responsibility in this area makes it less likely, not more likely, that the atmosphere will change. I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute. Since Senator Ayotte is not here to object, I will take it from her time.

Mr. BLUNT. The fact that this is in the bill and further improved, I believe, by the amendment, clearly says we are going to change the culture of the military. Had it not been for the hard work of my colleagues, particularly Senator McCaskill and Senator Gillibrand, this bill would not be as far along as it is. Their difference of opinion is not about solving this problem, because we all believe this problem is going to be solved. I think we all believe this bill takes a significant and strong step toward doing that. I feel most Senators will believe the McCaskill amendment adds another element to the bill. I am glad the defense committee, the Armed Services Committee, and now the U.S. Senate, are taking additional steps to solve this problem. It is a tragedy for every individual in the military, man or woman, who has been the victim of a sexual assault, reported or not. Whatever we can do to see that they are reported, minimized, and finally ended is what ought to happen. I hope this bill does that, and I believe it does. I was pleased to be part of bringing this bill to the floor, and I will be pleased when the McCaskill amendment is added to it today, and we face a new view of how this issue is dealt with. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. I rise to acknowledge Maj. Mark Shirley, serving as a Defense legislative fellow, and Robert Temple, an intern in my office. We have certainly benefited from both of them, particularly Major Shirley. He has been with our office for 1 year. This has been the first year I have been on both the Armed Services Committee and the Defense Appropriations Committee. Major Shirley's help in both of those cases has been exceptional. I am pleased we have had this benefit.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, Sonya and Jake, her husband, are from Troy, MO. She contacted us to tell me that when her husband quit his job a few years ago to start his own business they, of course, when that happened, lost their employer coverage, but they were able to check on health care coverage for the self-employed. They found what they thought was a really doable policy for them. They are young and they are healthy. They have six kids, but they are all pretty healthy. They were paying $400 a month, with a $5,000 deductible and 100-percent coverage after the $5,000. Their preventive care was already covered. But, of course, their policy just got canceled because it did not meet the ObamaCare guidelines. Their insurance company tells them that to get the same kind of coverage with the new guidelines, they are going to pay 125 percent more than they have been paying. Their insurance more than doubled. Their plan may not have been good enough for the new guidelines, but it was good enough for them. When the government begins to tell people what they have to have, it almost always costs people more. Also, we are seeing the high-risk pool in our State and every State go away. I am having all kinds of people saying their insurance is going to cost more, their deductible is higher, and many times the doctor who has been part of their health care challenge right up until now is no longer available to them. So much for ``if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.''