Roy Blunt: “I want to talk a few minutes about what is happening with health care. I came to the floor last week to talk about…”

“I want to talk a few minutes about what is happening with health care. I came to the floor last week to talk about individuals who were having problems. People are contacting our office. In fact, I suspect they are contacting 100 Senate offices every day expressing their concerns as they lose insurance. At least 4.2 million Americans have now received cancellation notices on the insurance they had. I know last week the President made his proposal that apparently you could keep the insurance you like for 1 year if your insurance company will still offer it and if the State insurance commissioner will approve it. But those are two pretty big ifs and certainly nowhere close to ``you can keep your insurance if you like it, period. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, period.'' Neither of those is going to turn out to be the case. In fact, insurance commissioners immediately--their organization--said this is going to be practically very hard to comply with. So it is one of many problems. I think the law that is most likely to apply with the Affordable Care Act will be the law of unintended consequences--consequences for individuals, consequences for people who had preexisting conditions and who in 35 States were being well served by something called the high- risk pool. Virtually all of those high-risk pools go out of existence on December 31.…”