On the recordDecember 9, 2015
I thank the Senator. I think we all know we need to do genuine health care reform sometime soon in the future because the reality is, the No. 1 driver of uninsurance in America is not preexisting medical conditions, although we all should empathize with the 4 million of the 320 million of us in America who have uninsurable preexisting medical conditions, but we are dealing with something on the order of 70 to 80 million Americans in a given calendar year who pass through a period of uninsurance, and the vast majority of them are uninsured because of our insurance pooling arrangements that are still an artifact of the 1940s and 1950s, where people had one job for decades at a time. When I was a college president, until a year ago coming to join you all here, and I would shake kids' hands at graduation when they walked across the stage, they were not going to just change jobs, they were going to change industries three times in their first decade postcollege. The No. 1 driver of uninsurance in America is job change. These kinds of policies that we are debating on the floor today make it harder to create portable health insurance plans that go with people across job and geographic change, which is actually what is driving the uninsurance in America. I thank the Senator for allowing me to sneak in for a minute. I am a rookie learning my way around here, but I was on the floor listening to your debate. Thank you for the opportunity.
