News

Rubio: “This is personal, it’s happening to people. You used to have health care coverage you were happy with, and now it’s not there anymore. The health care coverage you have costs more. You can no longer see the doctor or go to the specialty cancer center you once went to. They don’t have answers for any of these things.”  

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio
FOX News’ “Hannity”
April 1, 2014
http://youtu.be/SMBT70rMqlU

FOX News’ Sean Hannity: “Senator, I think about small business in America. I think about Amazon.com. They’re coming up with ways, that if you order something they will literally have a robot fly to your house and drop it on your front step. And then the government spends $677 million, and they still can’t get it right as the website went down yesterday for six hours. How are they going to run our health care?”  

Senator Marco Rubio: “Well, I think, first of all, you make a valid point about the ability to even function. But let’s remember what the purpose of this law was, supposedly. And that was to help the over 30-some-odd million American citizens who didn’t have health insurance to be able to have health insurance. And now, by every calculation, no matter what they’re doing, there’s still going to be over 30 million people that are uninsured in this country.

“I mean, the purpose of ObamaCare was not to get 7 million people, or 6 million people, or wherever the number now is, to sign up on a website. The purpose of ObamaCare, according to them, was to get more people insurance. And by all accounts it’s going to fall woefully short. You’re still going to have 30-some-odd million people in this country uninsured, but you have now disrupted the health care coverage of millions of other people who had health insurance that they were happy with. You’ve now disrupted the entire health care marketplace for purposes of a law, that quite frankly, has failed to make even a substantial dent on the number of uninsured.”  

…

Rubio: “I think they’ve used all sort of gimmicks to get people just to log onto the website and write their name in so that they can obviously go back and say, ‘Look, we hit some target.’ But here’s what they’re not telling you. There’s still a significant number of people — I saw a report a couple days ago that said that only 14 to 15% of the people who had signed up hadn’t paid. So you’ve got a substantial number of people that haven’t even paid into this. I mean, signing up is not the issue, you still have to get people that are going to make their monthly payments. And once people begin to realize that what they’re paying for comes with a high deductible and a high co-payment, that they even can’t start using this health insurance until they come up out-of-pocket with a certain amount of money that they don’t have. They’re going to realize they’re really not insured at all. And then you’re going to see the number of people that have signed up not continuing increase. And that, too, is going to truly undermine the ability of these exchanges to survive.”

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Rubio: “Here’s the bottom line, there’s a reason people don’t like ObamaCare. It’s because this is no longer some political issue they’re hearing about on the news. This is personal, it’s happening to people. You used to have health care coverage you were happy with, and now it’s not there anymore. The health care coverage you have costs more. You can no longer see the doctor or go to the specialty cancer center you once went to. They don’t have answers for any of these things. The bottom line is they have disrupted the entire health care marketplace for all Americans, and all they have to show for it is a small miniscule dent in the number of people that were uninsured that are now insured.”  

Hannity: “Let’s talk a little bit about some red state Democrats that are up for re-election this year, this very important midterm election year. There you have Mark Begich of Alaska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu, Kay Hagan. Many, if not all of them, literally are on the record saying exactly what President Obama said, ‘If you like your plan, you keep it. If you like your doctor, you keep it.’ What’s your reaction to that?”  

Rubio: “Well obviously that didn’t happen. For example, you  saw a few of them last week come out with a bill to try to fix ObamaCare. You really can’t fix this because we have to understand what this is. If you had told the American people, ‘Look, we are going to pass a bill that’s going to disrupt everybody’s health care coverage, including the people who are happy with what they have, in exchange for insuring a couple million people more than are insured now,’ people would say, ‘That doesn’t make any sense. That’s a terrible trade-off. And it’s going to cost us billions of dollars. And it’s going to do all these other impacts it’s having in terms of costing people their jobs.’ They’re going to have to defend that. Because that’s the reality of ObamaCare. They’re going to have to go back to their states and explain to people, why didn’t they just vote for this law, but they spent the last three and a half years as apologists for this law.”