quorum call:

the presiding officer: the senator from wisconsin. begin edwin mr. president, unanimous consent --. ms. baldwin: i ask unanimous consent to vitiate the quorum call. the presiding officer: without objection. ms. baldwin: i rise today to once again speak about the ongoing threat from the trump administration to the health care and guaranteed protections that millions of american families depend upon. president trump has tried to pass through the congress repeal plans that would take people's health care away and allow insurance companies to

discriminate against people with preexisting health conditions or refuse to serve them at all. when that legislative repeal effort failed in 2017, instead of working on a bipartisan way to lower health care costs and improve access to care for all americans, president trump turned to another tactic, sabotaging our health care system. and there are more americans uninsured today than there were when he took office. the trump administration has even gone to court. they've gone to court to support a lawsuit that would overturn the affordable care act, including its provisions that protect people with preexisting health conditions from

discrimination. think about that, he's asking a court to strike down health care provisions for americans. if he succeeds, insurance companies will once again be able to deny coverage or charge much higher premiums for the more than 130 million americans who have some sort of preexisting health condition, including more than two million who live in the state of wisconsin. what is the president's plan to protect people with preexisting conditions? he doesn't have one. he never has, and i have to say i doubt that he ever will. in fact, this administration has expanded what i call junk insurance plans. these are insurance plans that can deny coverage to people with preexisting health conditions, and they don't have to cover basic and essential health

services like prescription drugs or emergency room visits or maternity care. and most of these junk plans don't cover those things. now, when i spoke about this expantions -- expansion of what i call junk insurance on the senate floor two weeks ago, one of my republican colleagues responded and claimed that these plans preserve preexisting conditions protections and essential health benefits. so today i wanted to clarify the record and let's look at the fine print together. one of the junk plans currently available in my home state of wisconsin reads, quote, this plan has a preexisting limitation provision that may prevent coverage from applying to medical conditions that

existed prior to this plan's effective date. another junk plan that is sold in wisconsin states that the plan does not comply with the guaranteed essential benefits provided by the affordable care act. to quote directly, the description reads, and i quote, this coverage is not required to comply with certain federal market requirements for health insurance. principally those contained in the affordable care act. the tiny fine print on this particular junk plan instructs individuals to check their coverage carefully to make sure they are, quote, aware of any exclusions or limitation regarding coverage of preexisting conditions or health benefits, such as hospitalization, emergency services, maternity care,

preventive care, prescription drugs, and mental health and substance use disorder services. your certificate might also have lifetime and/or annual dollar limits on health benefits. end quote. the affordable care act protects people against these insurance company abuses. yet the expansion of these junk plans puts the power back in the hands of big insurance companies. let me be clear. american families do not want to go back to the days when health insurers can discriminate against people with preexisting health conditions, women and seniors, by denying them coverage or charging higher premiums simply because they get sick. as i have said in this chamber many times, the people of

wisconsin want both parties in congress to work together to make things better by making health care more affordable. i've heard from several wisconsinites who want to know why the president is working to repeal the affordable care act and take away their protections by expanding these junk plans. they're frightened that if this sabotage of our health system continues, insurance companies will again be able to deny coverage or charge higher premiums for the more than 130 americans who have preexisting health conditions, again including more than two million in my home state of wisconsin. i heard from carrie from baribou. carrie is a three-time cancer survivor, two breast cancer diagnosis and one melanoma.

she experienced her first diagnose at age 29 -- diagnosis at age 29. now at age 61, carrie is able to get the health care she needs without being punished financially for having a preexisting condition. carrie is worried that if the affordable care act is repealed that she could lose her health coverage or could be charged more because of her preexisting condition. another wisconsinite, keith in brookfield recently wrote into my office about what health care means to him and his family. keith and his son both have type one diabetes. both of them have health insurance through the affordable care marketplace that allows them to afford the insulin, gleek companies test strips, and -- glucose test strips and other medication they need. if the affordable care act is repealed, keith and his son likely would not even be eligible to purchase one of

these junk insurance plans. they could be denied coverage entirely due to their preexisting condition. we really need to act to stop this sabotage now. mr. president, i want to protect the guaranteed health care protections that millions of americans depend on. and that's why i've introduced legislation with my colleague senator doug jones of alabama to overturn the trump administration's expansion of junk insurance plans. because we should be increasing access to affordable, high quality health care options. the entire senate democratic caucus supports this legislation along with the two independents that caucus with us. the nation's top health care organizations representing tens of thousands of the nation's physicians, patients, medical students, and other health

experts support this legislati legislation. anyone who says they support health care coverage for people with preexisting conditions should support this bill. mr. president, as if in legislative session, i ask unanimous consent that the help committee be discharged from further consideration of s. 1556, the senate proceed to its immediate consideration, that the bill be considered read a third time and passed, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate. the presiding officer: is there an objection? a senator: mr. president, reserving the right to object. mr. thune: let me just say the plans to which the senator from wisconsin is referring are plans that thousands, tens of thousands of people are buying.

and one of the reasons they're buying them is because it allows them to buy the insurance they want at a price they can afford. and i can tell you as i'm sure the presiding officer can and probably everybody here can that when they travel across the country and you talk with farmers and ranchers and people who are buying their insurance on the individual market, the individual market has blown up. it's exploded. people are paying bdz 3,000 -- $3,000 a month, $36,000 a year with hugedeductibles. they're dropping coverage because they can't afford it. there are so many mandates and requirements it drove up the price. you had the skyrocketing premiums, higher deductibles, higher copays and that's precisely why the administration, i think, decided let's take these plans and give people the opportunity to buy the insurance they want at a price they can afford. so literally tens of thousands

of americans are now in these plans. what the senator from wisconsin is saying we're going to throw all these people off these plans. what does that do? that puts them back out probably uninsured which is would a lot of farmers and ranchers in places like south dakota are doing, they're just dropping coverage because they can't afford it. who can afford to pay $3,000 a month. that's what obamacare has left us and that's why we need new solutions and this is one that allows people to buy a plan they want at a price they can afford coupled with association health plans which democrats i think here in the senate are also objecting to and opposing which are also giving individuals opportunities to join larger groups and spread their risk and drive down their premiums. we need plans that people in this country can afford or more and more people are going to be in the ranks of the uninsured so mr. president, i object. the presiding officer: the objection is heard. ms. baldwin: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from wisconsin. ms. baldwin: i am disappoint thad my republican colleague has

once again chosen to -- well, a different colleague last time. that my colleagues have once again chosen to object to protecting people with preexisting health conditions. a senator: would my colleague yield? ms. baldwin: senator, i would be happy to yield. mr. wyden: i appreciate my colleague. i am in such strong support of your legislation, the no junk plans act and will speak briefly on it after you've concluded your important remarks. but apropos of what the distinguished senator from south dakota just said, isn't it correct that of course a plan is more affordabl affordable if itt cover anything. i'd be interested in my colleague's reaction to that because she's the lead sponsor. i remember being in wisconsin, seeing the wonderful support

that folks there have for my colleague because she's been a leader on these issues. and i'm just curious because certainly my friend from south dakota, the distinguished member of the finance committee, works with senator cortez masto and myself often works with us on matters but unless i'm missing something, he said that what he's interested in is care that's more affordable but it doesn't cover anything. what's my colleague's thought on that? ms. baldwin: well, i would concur and say that the reason they've earned the nickname junk plans is because frankly some of them are hardly worth the paper that they're written on. you think of -- first of all, they do not have to comply with some of the very important protections that we included as part of the affordable care act otherwise known as obamacare,

especially to protect people who had been ill once before or had been injured once before, people who have a preexisting health condition, maybe a chronic condition that will require medical care throughout their lives. and in the old days where apparently the republican senator wants to return, there were all sorts of abuses, i would argue, that insurance companies could employ in order to limit their exposure, if you will. so they had annual limits. they had lifetime limits. they had the capacity to drop somebody from coverage after an illness developed. they had the capacity to say no, we're not going to offer you insurance. they had certainly the capacity to charge discriminatory premium

based on the preexisting condition. and that causes great concern. i just saw recently a report about how much typical -- i don't want -- a woman with a breast cancer diagnosis who requires chemotherapy and radiation treatment and medication, how much she would be anticipated to spend out of pocket if she had a junk plan at the time that that diagnosis was made. and it was on average $40,000. $40,000. so we also need to talk about another impact that this -- these junk plans have, and that is that if you think that you have a really good chance of being healthy for the next year

and you decide that this is a risk that i can take, you are then fundamentally changing the structure of the marketplace for everyone else. because you can anticipate that this is a choice that healthier, maybe younger people will take and it has a distorting impact on premiums in the marketplace. and in fact that is why these plans were curtailed under the previous administration. and now this administration is greatly expanding these. they are no longer short term. they are long term. and a lot of harm will come. i wanted to just conclude that

when we have an administration that first fought legislatively to appeal the affordable care act that then acted administratively to undermine and sabotage the affordable care act through all sorts of -- again, administrative executive actions including defunding the state navigators who help people make wise selections for their insurance and also limiting the open enrollment period. when we have an administration that has decided to go to court and ask the court to strike down a u.s. law in its entirety, we know that there's sabotage going on. and i think that the choice for the american people couldn't be clearer. we want to make things better

and the administration enabled by some of my senate republican colleagues are walking down a path that has led to two million people losing their health insurance and others at grave risk of losing it in the future. with that i yield. mr. wyden: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from oregon. mr. wyden: before she leaves the floor, i just want to tell my colleague from wisconsin i think i speak for the distinguished senator from nevada as well that we're counting on our colleague from wisconsin to come back to this floor again and again and again to try to pass her bill. and i just want to tell her i will be with her every step of the way because i think,

colleagues, what we're looking at without the distinguished senator from wisconsin's bill is a new golden age for scam artists peddling insurance that isn't worth much more than the paper it's written on. and i was struck by my friend from wisconsin mentioning the old days of junk insurance. i was around for those old days. i remember when the health insurance system in this country was basically for the healthy and wealthy. if you were healthy, no sweat. you could get insurance. if you were wealthy, you just went off and paid the bills. but the insurance companies could go out there and clobber people with preexisting conditions. so that was junk insurance.

but i'm even older than that. i remember when i was director of the oregon gray panthers. i would go to a senior's house, and they would pull out a shoe box full of policies, 10, 15 policies. the distinguished senator from nevada who has done so much consumer advocacy for seniors i'm sure knows about this challenge with seniors. these policies weren't worth the paper they were written on. and they had -- i'm kind of a lawyer in name only -- what were called subrogation clauses. so if you had two policies and they basically covered the same thing, both of them would try to squirm out of covering you. so talk about junk insurance. and finally, i got elected to congress, like my colleague

activists, and we passed a law that said we're going to get rid of that so that you can have really only one policy except in unusual situations, and there were strong consumer protections. but if you look at what the trump golden age of scams is going to bring back, there are going to be lots of people who are going to get clobbered, and as my colleagues know, the people who are really going to get hit by this are, for example, older women who are arepre-medicare, because -- who are pre-medicare, because very often, their early 60's, late 50's, they have a lot of difficulty trying to find jobs that pay for health care coverage. so i am so appreciative of what my colleague is talking about. we're going to hear a lot of buzzwords by opponents of the baldwin lootion. they are going to talk about how they're offering flexibility and

they're offering patient-centered care, but that's just a bunch of eyewash because what they really do, as you touched on, is fail to give patients care when they most need care. so today americans ought to be protected from these worthless predatory scams. and one of the things that i was proudest of, really before my colleagues came here, is i wrote a piece of legislation, the help the americans act. a number of republican senators, by the way, were cosponsors of this bill, and it had air-tight, loophole-free protection to ensure that people with preexisting conditions didn't face discrimination. and we by and large got that provision into the affordable care act, and it meant, as john

mccain knew -- we often talked about it -- that health care would no longer be there just for the healthy and the wealthy. there would be real protection for those with preexisting conditions. and that was, for all practical purposes, really one of the two or three centerpieces of the affordable care act, because talk about a new age in insurance, that was it. health care insurance would no longer be there for the healthy and wealthy only. so senator baldwin is here, and what she is trying to do, i'm looking at that clock. she is trying to keep the trump people from turning it back. that's what they want to do when senator baldwin talks about the old days. forced march back to the days when the insurance companies could really in many instances just beat the stuffing out of vulnerable people. so i want to thank my colleague

for what she is doing. i heard just a little bit before i came over about it. so i basically said let's hold off on things for a couple of hours so i can go out there and stand with senator baldwin and her allies, and to me what's important is that you have been here today and it's going to be even more important that you come back again and again and again, so that that clock continues to move forward in terms of american health care and not go backward. i thank my colleague. we're really delighted to have senator cortez masto on the senate finance committee where she has been doing a lot of good work for health care and consumers and seniors. i look forward to her remarks and working with both of my colleagues. ms. cortez masto: mr. president. the presiding officer: the

senator from nevada. ms. cortez masto: thank you, and let me say on behalf of the state of nevada, i am so appreciative that i get to work with my colleagues from wisconsin, oregon. thank you for your commitment, because this is the number one issue in the state of nevada. to senator baldwin, what you are doing is really standing up for people and the right to have access to affordable health care in this country when they need it, access to medication when they need it. and the comfort of knowing that if they purchase a plan, that if something, god forbid, should happen to them, then they will have access to that medication and those doctors when they need it. thank you for your hard work. i stand today because i want to tell you about one of these people in the state of nevada. her name is carol eluski. she is from reno, nevada. carol has chronic asthma. she manages it with medication that cost up to $400 a month.

$400 a month. in october, 2016, carol had such a bad asthma attack that she was admitted to the hospital for ten days as doctors struggled to get her breathing under control. thankfully today carol's health is stable, but because of her preexisting condition and high prescription drug costs, she depends on the protections of the affordable care act to keep her health care costs in check. and this administration, as we have heard today from my colleague, keeps chipping away at those protections. i mean, literally we have heard from the president that he is proud of sabotaging the affordable care act. he has weakened the a.c.a. by expanding access to these junk plans. these short-term limited duration plans don't cover essential services like prescription drugs or emergency room visits and maternity care. so today i am joining my colleagues to once again urge

that we do away with the scam insurance policies. these plans appeal to consumers because they are low cost, but they are also low benefit, as we have heard. many people who purchase them don't realize just how limited the coverage is. all those details are in the fine print of the policies in dense legal jargon that doesn't nearly -- and is nearly impossible to understand. i'm an attorney and i will tell you, even attorneys have difficulty understanding that dense legal jargon in some of these policies. and consumers don't know that the plans they are signing up for can -- excuse me. the consumers don't know that the plan that they are signing up for because of the dense legal jargon and they are not given specifics and there is not enough transparency that they don't even cover their preexisting conditions. consumers may not realize that their canch has annual or lifetime spending caps.

take carol, for instance. let's say she had signed up for a junk plan instead of an a.c.a.-compliant plan. an easy mistake to make since companies hide the difference between the two. with a junk plan, carol's insurance could have refused to cover her health care costs because of her asthma. they could have denied payment for the emergency treatment she needed when she literally could not breathe. and they could have declined coverage for the essential medications she needs to keep the asthma in check. under these junk plans, women who get pregnant don't get coverage for prenatal care or for delivering their babies. people with lifelong genetic conditions like cystic fibrosis can be denied coverage, as can those facing mental health issues. what's more, even if you don't buy junk plans health care plans, these plans' very existence drive up our health care costs in this country. that's because younger,

healthier people are more likely to risk choosing a limited junk plan because those plans are cheaper. that leaves the rest of the population, including many women and children, in a much more expensive insurance pool. estimates say that junk plans could cost a family of four with an a.c.a. plan over $3,000 in increased insurance premiums every year. the no junk plans act that senator baldwin has introduced undo the administration's order that allowed insurance companies to offer consumers up to three years of deceptive, skimpy coverage. under the no junk plans act, customers can only use these short-term plans for 90 days. the plans would work the way they were intended, as a bridge between coverage at one job and the next. americans -- and i'm telling you, i hear this all the time in nevada -- have told us time and time again what they want their health care to do -- cover

preexisting conditions, keep down prescription drug costs, include women's health, coverage mental health, pay for emergency room visits. i'm going to continue to fight for what the american people want, and that's the comprehensive coverage of the affordable care act. we cannot let the administration succeed in doing an end run around the a.c.a. the house has already passed legislation to do away with these flimsy and deceptive junk plans. now it's time for the senate to step up and do the same. thank you, mr. chair, and i yield the floor.

mr. lee: mr. president. the presiding officer: the senator from utah. mr. lee: mr. president, president trump was famous for many things long before he was elected president of the united states. one of those things was the catch phrase you're fired, which he popularized on his reality tv show, "the apprentice." this is a relatively commonplace phrase. it's something most americans are familiar with, but it's not

surprising that the phrase would have so much appeal for a television audience. i think the reason has something to do with the fact that it carries a certain power and resonance with it, because the person who has the authority to use it within any organization is, generally speaking, the person who gets to call the shots. it's emblematic of executive control, and therefore of the ability to get things done within an organization. now, that's not to say that good leaders get their way solely or even primarily by threatening to fire people who work for them. effective leadership more often than not requires what are sometimes called soft leadership skills. but the fact nonetheless remains that the head of an organization must always have hanging in reserve, like a sort of employer sort