Opinion Pieces

In the nearly seven years since President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law, Americans have seen a few patterns emerge. On the positive end of the spectrum, every year we’ve seen more Americans gain health insurance, slower rises in overall health care costs and the ongoing implementation of vital consumer protections that put the American people before insurance companies.

Those trends have paid off: Nearly twenty million more Americans, including 38,000 Delawareans, have gained access to high-quality, comprehensive health care coverage since 2010.

But we’ve seen less inspiring trends as well – not least of which is a steady stream of misinformation and obstruction from some Republicans in Congress. Rather than work with Democrats to improve the ACA or develop an alternative plan of their own, many Republicans have spent the last six years working to repeal it more than 60 times.

Now, a week before President-elect Trump is sworn into office, the American people are set to face the consequences of Republicans’ malpractice. They want to try to repeal the ACA, yet again, without any plan to replace it.

Each of us entered Congress at a different point in the fight for high-quality health care. Senator Carper was serving in the U.S. Senate and was a primary architect of a number of the law’s provisions and has continued to call on Republicans and Democrats to work together and improve it. Senator Coons was elected to the Senate less than a year after it was signed into law and has consistently supported it and worked to improve it. And now, Congresswoman Blunt Rochester has been sworn into a House of Representatives controlled by a Republican majority more determined than ever to cause millions of Americans to lose their health insurance.

All three of us have long acknowledged the Affordable Care Act is not perfect. We’ve worked tirelessly with our colleagues to try to find Republican partners willing to work together to fix the parts of the bill that need fixing. We’ve never found any takers.

Earlier this month, Senator Carper and Senator Coons joined a number of our Democratic colleagues from across the country in a letter to Republican Senate leadership expressing our concerns with their plans to use a fast-track budget process to jam through a repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

As we wrote in the letter, repealing this law will have immediate negative impacts on the people we represent and the economy as a whole. We know there is more to do to improve the health care system in our country and agree that there are serious challenges that must be addressed.

We have long supported commonsense changes and improvements to the Affordable Care Act to ensure affordability and access for more Americans and have been ready and willing to work with anyone to improve the existing law for our constituents. This includes changes to the law that would address the growing costs of health insurance deductibles and making it easier for small businesses to be able to offer affordable options to their employees, which Senator Coons has sought to do by increasing tax credits for small businesses and pursuing common sense regulatory reforms. And we also need to make sure that there is more competition in the marketplace, especially for a small state like Delaware.

The American people deserve a constructive bipartisan conversation about improvements we know need to be made to our health care system, and that will require time for the two sides to work together. Any proposed changes must protect the parts of law that have helped Delawareans access critically needed health care.

But as we point out in the letter, outright repeal of the Affordable Care Act means that an estimated 30 million people would lose their health coverage, doubling the rate of uninsured, endangering Delawareans’ access to needed health care services and exposing them and their families to new financial risks if they become ill. More than 80 percent of those who would become uninsured are in working-class families.

It’s also not just those who directly get coverage on the exchange or through Medicaid expansion in Delaware who stand to lose under repeal. More than a half million people in Delaware are covered through employer-sponsored insurance plans. These plans have also benefited from the ACA, specifically from provisions that prohibit annual lifetime limits, allow young people to stay on their parents’ insurance until the age of 26 and require insurers to offer free preventive care services and spend at least 80 cents of each premium dollar on health care or care improvements, rather than overhead costs. Delaware has also moved towards a more efficient and value-based delivery of health care that improves health outcomes and reduces costs. All of these protections and progress are at risk under ACA repeal.

Undermining the U.S. health care system through outright repeal would also hurt our economy. Health care comprises one-sixth of the nation’s economic activity, meaning that a hasty repeal vote with no clear plan for replacing the law will inject tremendous uncertainty into the American economy and lead to higher health care costs for all Delawareans. And in an economy where women are increasingly becoming breadwinners for their families, cost and gender discrimination protections would be thrown out the window, placing undue and unfair burdens on working-class mothers and their families. That’s bad for Delaware workers and bad for Delaware businesses. Congress should be trying to reduce economic uncertainty, not exacerbate it.

As we wrote to Republican leadership in the Senate, here’s the bottom line: We’re still committed to improving the ACA, and if you come to the table with constructive ideas that put Americans’ health care before partisan politics, we’re ready to roll up our sleeves and get to work.

But by pushing an immediate repeal through a partisan reconciliation process, we won’t have the opportunity to work together and build on common ground. By moving forward with no plan in place for the future of our health care system, those who support repeal assume the responsibility of mitigating the unnecessary and avoidable chaos this will create. As your representatives in Congress, we’ll fight these misguided efforts every step of the way.

Chris Coons has represented Delaware in the U.S. Senate since 2010. Tom Carper is the Senior Senator from Delaware. Lisa Blunt Rochester is the first woman and the first African-American to represent Delaware in Congress.

Originally posted on the News Journal on 1/17/2017 at http://www.delawareonline.com/story/opinion/2017/01/17/congressional-malpractice-repealing-affordable-care-act-without-replacement/96671880/