Andy Barr: “Recently, some politicians in Washington and even back in my home State of Kentucky have held out Kentucky's online…”

“Recently, some politicians in Washington and even back in my home State of Kentucky have held out Kentucky's online exchange, or Kentucky Kynect, as a model for how the Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare, can be implemented successfully. They argue that ObamaCare is working in Kentucky. While it is true that, unlike the billion dollar malfunctioning healthcare.gov Web site, the Kentucky Kynect Web site has appeared to function properly, but that is about all that works well. ObamaCare is making life harder for most Kentucky families and small businesses, driving up premiums and deductibles, taking away choices of doctors and hospitals, and forcing people to lose the insurance coverage that they liked. The President promised that: if you like your health care plan, you will get to keep it. But 280,000 of my fellow Kentuckians have lost the health insurance that they had, the health insurance that they liked. The government is taking away choices. Patients, families, and doctors should be in control of their health care, but ObamaCare takes choices away from people. One insurance broker in Kentucky told me that insurance on the Kentucky Kynect exchange, the replacement for all of those canceled policies, excludes 90 out of 130 hospitals in Kentucky from its network. Then there is the cost. Premiums and deductibles are skyrocketing. When people are able to get the Web site to work, they are discovering that insurance is not affordable.…”