Committee Statements

For more than five years, the president’s health care law has failed to produce the kind of health care system the American people deserve. While the Obama administration continues to tout the “benefits” of its government takeover of health care, hardworking men and women across the country have been forced to contend with less access to doctors, a system plagued by waste and abuse, costly penalties, cancelled plans, and ever higher health care costs.

Those workers and families were promised that costs would go down. They’ve gone up. They were promised jobs would be created. They’ve been destroyed. They were promised that if they liked their health care plan, they would be able to keep it. We all know how that worked out. It’s only becoming clearer that the American people were handed a bunch of empty promises about the benefits of ObamaCare. What they’re seeing instead are consequences, and those consequences are playing out in communities across the country.

This reality is unacceptable. And it’s particularly unacceptable at a time when our economy is still struggling to recover, a time when so many people are still looking for jobs, and a time when small business owners are being forced to contend with a barrage of executive orders and regulations that make keeping their doors open a constant battle.

This is why it’s so important to make commonsense fixes to this law where possible – my constituents in New York’s 21st district want us to work together in Congress to ease the pain this law is having on so many North Country families and businesses.

The measure we’re here to discuss today is a step forward both in our efforts to protect workers and job creators from the president’s government-run health care system and in our efforts to rein in our out-of-control debt and deficits. It accomplishes those goals by getting rid of a duplicative and onerous ObamaCare mandate known as auto-enrollment. In moving employer-sponsored health care coverage away from a voluntary and flexible model, the president’s health care law has created a myriad of penalties and mandates.

This particular provision requires certain employers to automatically enroll their full-time employees in health care coverage.

What this means is that is a veteran or student in my district who is eligible for tri-care or to stay on their parent’s healthcare plan gets a job, they will be automatically enrolled in an unnecessary health care plan unless they know about this provision and decline coverage within a prescribed amount of time.

Making sure an employee has health care coverage sounds like a perfectly admirable goal. However, in this case, the cons outweigh the pros. 

This auto-enrollment mandate will create a lot of unnecessary confusion for my constituents and, by triggering tax penalties, could actually cost employees who might already be enrolled in health insurance coverage. The mandate will also limit an employee’s ability to select a health care policy that works best for his or her family. It’s redundant, it’s unnecessary, and it’s not in line with the patient-centered health care system this country needs. The measure under consideration today would eliminate that misguided mandate, but does nothing to take away an employee’s ability to opt-in and enroll in his or her employer’s coverage.

The proposed substitute amendment simply makes technical drafting corrections to the underlying proposal.