May 4, 2012

Just over two years ago, the Patient Care and Affordable Care Act was signed into law. At the time, many promises were made by the President and the authors of the law that have turned out to not be true. The law will cost $1.6 trillion more than the original sticker price, leaves 27 million people without insurance, and burdens businesses with over 10,000 pages of rules and regulations. Premiums continue to rise and it turns out that you will not actually be able to keep coverage that you like. Under this law, the federal government was given the authority to mandate that every American purchase health insurance or face penalties for not complying. The Supreme Court is currently considering the constitutionality of the law and is expected to make a final decision by the end of June.

This is not what the American people were looking for when Congress took up health care reform. We must replace the law with common sense reforms that would give states the ability to enact health reform at the state level, promote greater competition in the insurance market, and reduce health care costs. 

Below is material from 2010, written during the debate over the bill that is now the law.

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On July 12, 2007, I introduced my 10 step plan for stabilizing and reforming the nation’s health care system. The bill, S. 1783, builds on numerous health care proposals to expand access to quality health insurance in the U.S. The hallmark of this proposal is to provide more options, more choices and more control to every American.

My plan would allow market-based pooling and equalize tax treatment of health insurance for all Americans. It proposes new market-based solutions that will enable uninsured working families to purchase private health insurance. The bill would expand choices and coverage and give individuals control over their health care and health records. It would also enhance health care quality and reduce costs.

I’ve dedicated a large portion of my life to improving our health care system. I’ve intensified my efforts over the last decade as a member, the chairman and now ranking member of the Senate Health Committee. I’ve sponsored bills and amendments, mounted health care idea campaigns, written thousands of letters, questioned witnesses in hearings, spoke to groups in Wyoming and Washington, done interviews with both national and Wyoming media, spent countless hours in meetings with my colleagues, made my case to the President directly in the White House and in a widely-viewed public forum. It’s been a long road and we’ve still got a long way to travel.

U.S. Senator Mike Enzi

Senator Michael B. Enzi
TEN STEPS TO TRANSFORM HEALTH CARE IN AMERICA
Building on Market-based Solutions and Strengthening Current Insurance Programs

1. Eliminates unfair tax treatment of health insurance for all Americans, thereby expanding choices, coverage, and control over your health care
2. Increases affordable options for working families to purchase health insurance through a standard tax deduction
3. Ensures affordable health insurance to low-income individuals through a refundable, advanceable, assignable tax-based subsidy
4. Provides cross-state pooling to reduce health care costs and increase accessibility for small business owners, unions, associations, and their workers, members, and families
5. Blends the individual and group market to extend important HIPAA portability protections to the individual market so that insurance security can better move with you from job to job
6. Emphasizes preventive benefits and helps individuals with chronic diseases so America will finally have health care and not sick care
7. Gives you the choice to convert the value of your Medicaid and SCHIP program benefits into private health insurance, putting you in control of your health care, not the Federal government
8. Saves lives and money by better coordinating health information technology to improve health care delivery
9. Increases access to primary care in rural and frontier areas by helping future providers and nurses pay for their education, and gives seniors more options to receive care in their homes and communities
10. Decreases the sky-rocketing cost of health care by restoring reliability in our medical justice system through State-based solutions