Senator Marshall: Democrats Walked Away From a One-Year Subsidy Extension & Real Solutions to Fix our Healthcare Crisis

Senator Marshall Delivers Remarks & Asks for Unanimous Consent to Pass The Marshall Plan

Washington – On Thursday, U.S. Senator Roger Marshall, M.D. (R-Kansas), delivered remarks on the Senate floor outlining his healthcare package, known as “The Marshall Plan.” Senator Marshall explained how America’s healthcare crisis emerged, laid out his reforms to fix it, and then requested Unanimous Consent to pass his bill, the Lowering Healthcare Costs for Americans Act. 

Senator Marshall’s bill failed after Democrat Senator Blunt-Rochester (D-Delaware) objected to the request.

Click HERE and HERE to watch both portions of Senator Marshall’s Full Remarks.

Senator Marshall’s Remarks as Delivered:

“Mr. President, my grandma taught me so many things, and had so many great old sayings. One of the things she taught me is that if you have your health, you have everything. If you have your health, you have everything. I think that’s one of the reasons I wanted to become a doctor. I wanted to help give people their health, but Mr. President, healthcare is in a crisis right now. Health care is in a crisis. Doctors think healthcare is in a crisis. Nurses think health care is in a crisis. Patients, families, Americans, we all think that health care is in a crisis, and the Democrat solution is, frankly, just to throw more money at the problem. Throw more money at the problem, which really inflates everybody else’s cost of healthcare.

“What our party would like to do is to empower patients, not insurance companies. We want to put patients in charge, not insurance companies. And before we dive down a little deeper into our bill that we’re asking Unanimous Consent for today, I want to answer, I think, one of the toughest questions I’ve been asked and and the question is, you know, when I go back home in January, families are going to look to me and say, What? Why couldn’t you fix healthcare? And I want the record to show right now that the Democrats are walking away from a year-long extension on the enhanced subsidies. They’re walking away, we’re offering it. I don’t think the subsidies are a good idea. I never did, but my heart says it’s the right thing to do. So let the record show that if the Democrats object to this bill, they’re walking away from a year-long extension of Obamacare in exchange for empowering patients. 

“You know, this crisis, I think we understand, needs to understand a little bit more where this crisis came from. Obamacare has been the law of the land now for 15 years, and perhaps Speaker Pelosi is most famous moment of her career is when she said, we need to pass the bill so we can see what’s in it. Well, now we know what’s in it. We know it was written by insurance companies. We’re giving them $150 billion a year. It was written by PBMs. It was written by big hospital systems, big healthcare systems, who’ve driven the spin on healthcare for this country now to $5 trillion a year. What we’ve ended up with, of course, the costs are higher. No one can deny that the average premiums are now more than 200% higher than they were. Access is worse. Fraud is rampant, and really, Obamacare is junk insurance, right?

“When they talked about what junk insurance was, when they argued for Obamacare, Obamacare was turned into junk insurance when families have a deductible of $15,000 a year. That’s junk insurance, right? So we ended up doing just the opposite of what they stated their intended goals were. Goals were to listen, listen to what the Democrats are saying now and then, what they’re willing to do. Let me just sum up briefly what our plan does, and then I’ll maybe go a little bit deeper.

“Number one is we address the fraud. Number two, we extend the Obamacare, the Biden era, extended subsidies for another year. We fund CSRS. We address fraud. If I didn’t say that yet, and then starting in 2027, we would start taking some of that money that we were using on these extended subsidies, that’s about $35 billion a year. We would start putting that into your debit card, into your health care debit card, 1000s of dollars per family. You know, for some it might be $7,000, for some it might be $5,000, but we want to, want you to start making choices. And then lastly, what our bill does, and this is really why I’m so confused, why Democrats would walk away from this, if there was one good thing about Obamacare was addressing pre-existing conditions. And we’ll talk about that morning in a second. But our bill funds invisible, high-risk reinsurance pools, so it’s like belts and suspenders for people who develop high-risk conditions. 

“So let’s dive into each one of these pillars a little bit more. Number one is, let’s stop the fraud. No one can deny that there’s significant fraud in Obamacare. We don’t know exactly how much it is? $20 billion? Is it $30 billion? We know that a third of people in Obamacare never make a claim. A third of people on Obamacare never make a claim. And we know that we saw the number the fraud increase significantly when we allowed people to have $0 in the game. So what our bill does is, number one, it requires an ID, ID verification, it requires work verification, it requires income verification, and then it requires you to contribute $5 a month if these were implemented, I really think we would save the country $25 billion a year, and again, that would more than fund this high-risk pool that I’d like to do. I think of stopping the fraud, there couldn’t be anything simpler. But even just yesterday, the Democrats refused, and they voted down addressing the fraud.

“Next, our pillar is real price transparency. If we adopted this the cost of health care for everyone, whether you’re on Obamacare, or you get your money through your work, or you’re on Medicare, it would drive down the cost of health care by everybody for 20 by 20% rather than spending $5 trillion a year, this country be spending $4 trillion a year, think of the great things else we could do if we had that money to do better things with it. We could fund community health centers. So many great things we could do out there from a health care stamp standpoint as well, but by giving price tags to patients, by forcing every health care provider up front to have a list of every thing that they offer, and have that already on a website ran by CMS, and you’re sitting there in your hometown and the doctor says You need to have your knee replaced, and you could automatically have populated within 60 miles all the hospitals charges and you’re going to find, some hospitals charge $10,000 for that hip replacement. Others charge $60,000 for it. Some $120,000 for it. Heck, you might even hop on a plane and fly from New York City to Kansas to save $120,000 on a hip replacement, and we’ll put you up in the best hotel in all of Kansas to do that. But price tags are what cures that. Price tags turn patients into consumers. It lets patients become shoppers again. Over and over again on Black Friday, Americans demonstrate to me that they have strong purchasing power, and they know what they want to do with those dollars. So by empowering patients, by turning them into shoppers again, by forcing price tags, this is going to lower the cost of health care for everybody by 20%.

“Our third pillar is to bridge subsidies for families. Look, you don’t have to convince me. The cliff people are facing because of Obamacare, premiums are going to go up 20 to 30%, regardless of what we do here in Congress, premiums are going to go up 30%, and I want to help those people. It may be, you know, the people most impacted by this cliff, there’s probably a million of them. Maybe there are 2 million of them as well, and that’s why we need to do more than this bill is to impact them long term by allowing them to purchase health care across state lines and expand Association Healthcare plans. But again, we’re extending the subsidies for one year. Nobody, no other deal up here, on the Republican side, addresses that, except for this particular deal. I know my friends want three years – look, let’s talk about it. What? What would it take for you to actually consider driving the true cost of health care down, and not just throwing money at the problem? And I just can’t emphasize enough, you’re a family of four, you’re making $80,000 a year, which is more than the average salary in Kansas, and you have a $15,000 deductible. That’s not access to health care, you have to admit. And I think my Democrats do admit that Obamacare is broken.

“Next, I want to just talk about our invisible state-run high-risk pools. Look, I talked for a second about pre-existing conditions. The one thing I was really excited about with Obamacare was it took care of their pre-existing conditions. Guess what the most common pre-existing condition is in America?…  It’s pregnancy. Mr. President, I delivered a baby almost every day of my life for 25 years. And believe it or not, less than half of pregnancies are planned. And when couples were purchasing, they got married, they purchased health insurance, and they were going to save a couple of 100 bucks by not including pregnancy. They thought it was a good idea. But guess what, Mother Nature doesn’t always cooperate, and again, half of these pregnancies were not planned, so I was glad to see us address pre-existing conditions. But even now, we know insurance companies do play games to try to keep you out once you have a tough diagnosis, but if those insurance companies knew that based upon your diagnosis and the money you’re spending, you’re already going to this partially federally funded high-risk pool, that it would keep everyone’s premiums down, and my friends across the aisle talk about, you know, they tug at people’s hearts, which I want to do as well: we don’t want anyone to face bankruptcy because of health care, but that’s happening now, right? Admit it, your plan is not working.

“We’re all these many, many families are facing and have taken bankruptcy because of the cost of health care. So we use this belt and suspenders approach. We have the pre-existing conditions in Obamacare. We keep those, but then we do something better by funding these high-risk pools as well. High-risk pools let us protect the sick without punishing the healthy. If these catastrophic costs are covered, premiums fall for everyone. That’s just simple common sense. If you think about the different these five pillars here that I’m that I want the Democrats to read with, I bet we drive down the cost of health care by 40 to 50% you know, our last pillar is just this, theme of turning patients into consumers by giving them price tags, by putting federal dollars in your debit account for health care, by giving you price tags, we turn you into shoppers again. It’s going to lower the cost for everybody, and then we start reallocating that waste from fraud and abuse.

“What makes our plan different from anybody else’s out there? We address the fraud. We have price tags that no other plan has. It bridges the subsidies. Instead, my Democrats are offering a $38 billion fix. The Democrats are just compounding the junk insurance. With all due respect to my friends across the aisle, you’re just throwing good money after bad money. By extending these subsidies for three years, it’ll be at least $83 billion, and the way healthcare is accelerating, it’ll be $100 billion again. I do feel the pain of these folks. I mean, these are my friends, my neighbors. A top-three issue for every family in America, for every business in America, is the cost of health care. How can you walk away from a plan that’s going to drive the cost of health care down 40 to 50% and instead you just want to offer more junk insurance? Your plan doesn’t do anything to bring down the cost of the deductibles in the plan. That’s the problem. You could pay for their whole premium. You are, we are paying for their whole premium, but then they have a $15,000 deductible, that’s not access to health care.

“I don’t know why my friends across the aisle don’t want to have meaningful discussions. Why do you not want to talk about fixing the problem? There’s so much more than this that we should be talking about right now. Again, pharmacy benefit manager reform comes to mind, expanding community health centers, making sure everybody has meaningful access to primary care, and bringing mental health into those community health centers. Those are all real solutions, expanding Association health care plans, letting it be purchased across state lines. Could you imagine if Sam’s Club, Costco, or Amazon had an association health plan that you could sign up for? Think of the purchasing power that they would have.

“Mr. President, there are real solutions out there. These are real solutions. Democrats have asked for a plan. This is, frankly, just the start of a good plan, but it would help bridge us over the next year to go after these other issues we can address on a bipartisan basis. And remember, I’ll just close with this, Mr. President, when patients ask their senators in January why their health insurance premiums went up, and they’re going to ask you, why did you vote against Senator Marshall’s plan that extended the subsidies for a year? I hope you’ve got a great answer for that. Thank you, Mr. President.”

Senator Marshall called for Unanimous Consent on his bill S.3389. Democrat Senator Blunt-Rochester (D-Delaware) objected to the UC.

“Again, I greatly respect the words and have great respect for my senator, my colleague and good friend from Delaware, and I know both of us share the same heart that we want everyone, every American, to have meaningful access to healthcare – there are many things we agree upon. The PBM Disclosure Act is but one example. Bringing down the cost of health prescription drugs would be a huge priority for us as well. We both agree that fraud is a problem. Take this bill and improve it. Is it too little? It probably is too little, but it’s a start. It’s a frame. It’s a framework. You had the legislative text.

“Look, I became very pragmatic in my days in Washington. I can’t change what happened in 2010 before I got here. I can’t change all the histories of this, this dealing with healthcare. I can’t change the fact that we have 100 senators with 100 ideas to fix Obamacare. I’ve always said tackling Obamacare is like tackling a buffalo that just ran through a barbed wire fence, and every time you try to pull a layer of that barbed wire off, you get poked with it. I understand that, but this is a great framework. It’s a very it’s my effort at a bipartisan framework to get us started, and again, offering the olive [branch] of extending the Biden-era subsidies for another year, I think, is just the biggest olive branch I can make. And again, come January, my Democrat friends are going to have to answer that question: why did you walk away from Senator Marshall’s plan to extend those subsidies for a year? Thank you, Mr. President. I yield back.”

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Contact: Payton Fuller