Health Care Reform

As a member of both the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, which have jurisdiction over health care issues, I have been uniquely positioned in the debate over the reform of our health care system. With the help of Kansans like you, I formed the following principles when it comes to health care reform.

First, any reform should lower the costs of health insurance and health care for American families. Second, patients and doctors, and not the government, should be in charge of making decisions about care. Third, health care reform should not be paid for on the backs of seniors through cuts to the Medicare program. Fourth, the government must live within its means - reform should not add to the deficit or result in higher taxes. Finally, reforms must not impede our economic recovery through higher taxes on families, passed-on costs to consumers, or job-killing taxes on employers.

In 2010, Congress approved and President Obama signed into law two bills, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (P.L. 111-148) and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act (P.L. 111-152). Together, these bills comprise the new health care reform law, commonly known as Obamacare. Because they did not meet my principles for reform, and because they were opposed by a clear majority of Kansans and Americans, I voted against this overhaul of our health care system both in the Finance and HELP Committees and on the floor of the Senate.

During the debate over Obamacare, Democrats and the president claimed that the law would lower health care costs, create hundreds of thousands of jobs, protect Medicare, and allow Americans to keep their health care plans. Years later, it's clear that not one of those promises will be kept. Numerous concerns which I, and many of my colleagues, had during the debate on this bill continue to ring true.

The law cost the nation more than two trillion dollars and has created higher premiums, higher taxes and less choice. Insurance companies cancelled plans, highlighting President Obama’s broken promise that if you like your plan, you can keep your plan. In Kansas, premiums have doubled for individual insurance market plans over the law’s first four years and insurers continue to leave the market. For more on the broken promises of Obamacare, click HERE.

Fix Health Care, Not Obamacare:

Congress should repeal and replace the law with true reforms that will improve access and actually lower costs for patients. We need to move health care away from Obamacare and toward a more affordable system where health care decisions are made by patients and their doctor, not the government. Here are a few of the principles I support:

• Improving transparency in health care quality and costs so that patients have more information on how to best spend their health care dollar;
• State-based solutions, not federal government mandates, to cover the uninsured and to protect individuals from catastrophic health care costs;
• Equalizing the tax code so that people without access to employer-sponsored insurance can deduct their premiums – which would give individuals the same tax benefits as businesses;
• Reducing overall health care costs through reform of our medical liability system;
• Incentives for individual responsibility that allow insurers and employers to reward healthy behaviors;
• Increasing competition by allowing individuals to purchase insurance across state lines.