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AFFORDABLE HEALTHCARE FOR ALL
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Underwood) for 5 minutes.
Ms. UNDERWOOD. Madam Chair, from the very first day I was sworn into Congress in January of 2019, I have been on a mission to expand access to high-quality, affordable healthcare for people in my northern Illinois district and Americans across the country.
It is actually a mission that started long before I came to Congress. In fact, it started when I was in elementary school. That is when I was first diagnosed with a heart condition that I have lived with ever since. Because of that preexisting condition, I spent most of my life at risk of losing healthcare coverage.
That all changed when the House passed the Affordable Care Act and it was signed into law in 2010, protecting people like me with preexisting conditions and eventually extending coverage to more than 20 million Americans, many for the first time in their adult lives.
These historic gains have always hung in the balance, subject to more than 50 attempts from Republicans to repeal the law over the past decade.
But the ACA didn't just survive; it is now stronger than ever before, thanks to the 2-year version of my Health Care Affordability Act that was included in the American Rescue Plan.
Thanks to the advanced premium tax credit expansion that I championed, marketplace enrollees are seeing savings of more than $40 per person per month, a 40 percent reduction in their monthly spending on healthcare. That means more money for groceries, school supplies, and essentials that families depend on.
Medium plan deductibles for new enrollees have dropped by nearly 90 percent, from $450 to $50.
Half of eligible uninsured Hispanic adults and 45 percent of eligible uninsured Black adults are now able to find a zero-premium plan.
In just 6 months since the American Rescue Plan was signed into law by President Biden, we have cut our Nation's uninsured rate, provided substantial savings for individuals and families, and taken the most significant step toward health equity since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law.
But if we fail to act now and make the American Rescue Plan's advanced premium tax credit plan permanent, all of this progress will be wiped out in just 2 years. Americans will lose the coverage they are now protected by or once again face premiums that render coverage unaffordable and lead them to forgo insurance altogether. The gains that we have made in closing coverage gaps in communities of color will be reversed. The millions of people who might now have health insurance for the first time in their adult lives will once again lay awake at night wondering if they are one illness away from bankruptcy.
We cannot afford to backtrack on the historic progress we have made for the American people. This is our moment to stand on the right side of history and finish the job to reach universal coverage that was started by the Obama-Biden administration more than a decade ago.
We must make the advanced premium tax credit from the American Rescue Plan permanent and close the Medicaid coverage gap in the Build Back Better Act.
We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make high-quality healthcare affordable and accessible to all. The American people are counting on us to get this done, and we must deliver.
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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 167, No. 171
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