Families USA Statement for the Record for the Senate HELP’s Committee Hearing on Making Health Care Affordable Again

Families USA submitted this statement for the record for the December 3 Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP) hearing, “Making Health Care Affordable Again: Healing a Broken System.”

In the statement, Families USA calls on the Committee to extend — in their current form and without harmful changes — enhanced premium tax credits for the nearly 22 million Americans who rely on them to purchase comprehensive health coverage from the federal or state health insurance Marketplaces. We urge the Committee to act without delay. Now, in the midst of open enrollment, millions of families find themselves either being forced to try to secure health insurance with premiums that are double or triple their current amount or going without ANY health care coverage purely due to the cost. In addition to a clean and immediate extension of the tax credits, we urge Congress to ensure people who have already decided they cannot afford to keep their coverage have the opportunity and assistance to come back and re-enroll through policies including special enrollment periods and Navigator funding.

The statement also discourages the Committee from focusing on recently floated but meaningless alternatives to the tax credits, such as a one-time cash handout or coupon, or through bigger uptake of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), Flexible Savings Accounts (FSAs) or Health Reimbursement Accounts (HRAs). These proposals utterly fail to meet this moment and would strand millions of people without any meaningful access to care.

And finally, the statement pushes the Committee to advance solutions that actually address the root causes of unaffordable health care through well-vetted, bipartisan and commonsense legislation that promotes meaningful transparency and accountability, reduces waste and inefficiencies driven by corporate health systems and roots out conflicts of interest that increase health care costs. Such solutions have strong support across the political spectrum as shown in our recent poll.