Michael Bennet

Solving this is long overdue. There is strong bipartisan support.

Thank you for inviting me to share a few words on behalf of my fellow Coloradan, Dr. Walter Copan.

The Affordable Care Act is anything but affordable and everybody knows it.

The answer to everything is not more money that we do not have, that the answer to everything is not more Federal Government that we do not need.

There were over 60 attempts in the House of Representatives to repeal a law that helped over 600,000 Coloradans obtain access to health insurance.

Here, we do not know what this new system would look like.

We will be once again chasing our tail around this place.

I am not sure it is going to be great for the American people.

I appreciate my colleagues' commitment to federalism, but I suspect that part of the reason why this has become an attractive vehicle is not just that it is the last one standing.

For the last 7 years, the Republican Party has made repealing the Affordable Care Act their defining issue.

I do not understand the obsession with winding down and ultimately getting rid of Medicaid expansion.

This is a transfer from Democratic States to Republican States.

Millions of people will lose their insurance if we pass this bill.

I cannot believe the hypocrisy of people supporting this bill and saying that they are fighting against insurance companies when what they are doing is stripping hard-earned consumer protections from the American people. It is a disgrace.

You will own that chaos, because if you do not do what the consensus was with the CSR and with creating some flexibility and having the mandate or some other idea to have the mandate, you will get instability like you have not seen before.

I appreciate the fact that we are now relying on a CBO score which should have come months ago or weeks ago.

We choose not to take any of the recommendations that have been made in a bipartisan way in hearings in the HELP Committee.

All of our politics for the last 9 or 10 years, almost, about health care has been distorted as a result of trying to figure out what the right answer for that 7 percent is.

This throws a bunch of people off Medicaid with absolutely no suggestion about how they will be covered.

This is to keep a campaign promise to repeal Obamacare, because in the bill we talked about in the HELP Committee, Obamacare would not be repealed.

It tends to be that way.

Edmund Burke is spinning in his grave at legislation like this. The kind of dislocation this is going to create merely to keep a campaign promise to repeal Obamacare is a disgrace.

President Trump said he could do better and promised a much more generous version of repeal and replace on the campaign trail.

The United States is unusual among advanced economies in that we have millions of children living in poverty in our country.

I hope we can get to bipartisan tax reform.