Date: 2014-03-26
Speaker: GENE GREEN (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: Texas

First of all. I thank my colleague from San Antonio. We are both Texans. and we know the problems. You served a lot of years in the State legislature. I did. too. Frankly. I think a lot of our problems could have been dealt with if Texas would have expanded Medicaid. We are actually giving back money to the Federal Government and not covering children and families in our community because of that. Frankly. even with the problems with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. I know some States have done a great job. like Kentucky and California. Some States havent. But I would think that if Texas did their own exchange. we could be the ones making those decisions. I think particularly with the Medicaid expansion. I appreciate you asking for the Special Order tonight because we are coming down up to the deadline of March 31. In fact. I have to do a commercial first. A lot of us have done these events on how people can sign up for the Affordable Care Act. I have one that we are sponsoring this Saturday at the Harris County Department of Education building. It is at 6300 Irvington Boulevard in our district. I am partnering with some of your former colleagues: State Representative Armando Walle. State Representative Jessica Farrar. our relatively new State senator. Sylvia Garcia. and our city council member. Ed Gonzalez. We are doing that this Saturday from 9 to 1 so people can come in and sign up. The success. though. is that the Web site was down for 2 months. but we have seen a huge number of people signing upS million as of last week. I hear on Monday of this week they had 1 million contacts. both by phone and to the Web site. So there is a need out there for the Affordable Care Act. It is landmark health care reform. I was on the subcommittee and the Committee of Energy and Commerce to help draft part of it. We did days and nights of drafting amendments. We had both bipartisan amendments adopted. including one on mental health that Congressman MURPHY from Pennsylvania and I had worked out to expand mental health coverage. Of course. we live in a bicameral Congress and sometimes the Senate doesnt always do what we would like to do on the House side. That is the nature of it. But the Affordable Care Act is expanding health care access. You mentioned some of the successes that we have. I know as a State legislator I would have loved to have a State law that required insurance companies to pay 80 percent of their premiums they received back as benefits. I dont know of any State that does that. I would have loved to have that in Texas. Somebody who pays an insurance premium. whether it is employer health care or an individual health policy. they can be guaranteed that 80 percent of their premium will come back in benefits. That is what the Federal law is. We hear our Republican colleagues say they still havent come up to an alternative to the Affordable Care Actbecause they cant. That is one of the successes in there. and there are a lot of successes. In fact. some of that law is actually Republican ideas that have been built up over the last 20 or 30 years. saying. How can we cover the uninsured in our country?