Political Quotes

“Madam President, I intend to offer a motion to commit the reconciliation bill to the Finance Committee with instructions to report the bill back to the Senate within 3 days, not counting any day on which the Senate is not in session, with changes eliminating provisions that would weaken access to essential health benefits, reduce access to affordable preventive services, and undermine the prohibition of annual and lifetime limits and caps on out-of-pocket expenditures for health insurance plans. I am offering this motion because the reconciliation bill affects tens of millions of Americans who gained health coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, ACA. The reconciliation bill allows insurers to eliminate coverage of essential health benefits. Insurance companies could exclude essential benefits like maternity care, substance use disorder treatment, mental healthcare, prescription drugs, and hospitalization--the very services people buy insurance to obtain. Before the ACA, one-third of individual market health plans did not cover substance use disorder services, nearly one- fifth of those plans did not cover mental health, and only nine States required all insurers on the individual market to cover maternity care. Allowing States to waive essential health benefits would also allow insurance companies to reinstate annual and lifetime caps.…”