Maria Cantwell: “Now, Mr. President, I rise today to urge my colleagues to continue to work on the affordable care issues that are facing…”

“Now, Mr. President, I rise today to urge my colleagues to continue to work on the affordable care issues that are facing our Nation. We know that we have to work together to address the Affordable Care Act and that the system needs to continue to have updates. We know that in this time period since 2010, the uninsured rate in the United States was a staggering 18.2 percent. After the enactment of the ACA, which significantly expanded coverage, around 45 million Americans had access to either Medicaid or the ACA plans--and that is that we actually cut by more than half the uninsured rate to an alltime low in 2023 of 7 percent. Now, in my home State, we took advantage of the Affordable Care Act and further drove the uninsured rate down to 4 percent, significantly reducing hospitals' and providers' financial burden from providing uncompensated care. So there has much been said about these individual provisions in the Affordable Care Act on the exchange, but the bottom line is--that ability for the Affordable Care Act to drive the uninsured rate in half to an alltime low of 7 percent and 4 percent in my State is a great example of what it did to help lower costs across the whole system. There are still some challenges on the exchange, and there are more affordable ways to deal with that population on the exchange. I authored one of them called the Basic Health Program.”