Click here to watch Sen. Barrasso’s remarks.

WASHINGTON, D.C.— Today, U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) delivered the following remarks on the Senate floor regarding the high costs and high taxes Americans face under Obamacare.

Excerpts of Senator Barrasso’s remarks:

“For a number of years we have been debating health care in this country.

“Clearly our health care system had problems eight years ago.

“Well, then Washington Democrats tried their solution—it’s been known as Obamacare.

“Republicans said it wouldn’t work – and we have been proven right.

“Obamacare is too costly, it is collapsing.

“Yesterday, as we were having our policy lunch meetings, Republicans and Democrats, word came out that another one of the Obamacare exchange companies, this time in Ohio, Athem, was pulling out.

“Leaving about 18 counties in Ohio, if not more, without anyone to sell insurance on the Obamacare exchange.

“So Obamacare didn’t actually solve the problems with America’s health care system. In many ways, it made matters worse.

“That’s why the law has never really had the support of the American people and continues to be unpopular today.

“It’s why more than 19 million people actually have chosen not to sign-up for Obamacare coverage at all. Even in spite of financial incentives to do so.

“The Democrats when they come to the floor to talk about health care refuse to talk about those 19 million people who just said we want nothing to do with Obamacare. We’re not going to sign up, give us an exemption, let us out.

“They want to talk about people that they actually have covered by pushing them into a broken Medicaid system.

“It wasn’t working well before Obamacare and it’s gotten worse.

“For people who didn’t end up in Medicaid who paid their premiums, those premiums have gone up significantly, doubled in most states.

“In my home state of Wyoming, they were actually higher than the national average has been up.

“There were two companies at one point that were selling insurance on the exchange. Both losing money. One lost so much that they’re no longer in business. The other still losing money and still selling on the exchange. But you wonder how long they’ll stay.

“There was an article in the paper here in Washington, Roll Call, and the headline was: ‘Insurers Seek Increases for Obamacare Premiums in Early Filings.’ This is for next year.

“The article talked about how insurance companies are starting to say how much they’re going to need to charge people next year. Which is much higher than this year.

“They’re talking about an average increase about 30 percent.

“The average premium in the Obamacare market in Wyoming right now is already more than $7,000 a year for a family.

“How much more of this can people take?

“The other thing is taxes. There are at least 15 new or higher taxes under Obamacare.

“There’s a new tax that increases how much people have to pay for their prescription drugs.

“The Congressional Budget Office has looked at this and it said Americans are going to pay more than $28 billion over the next 10 years on just one tax on prescription drugs.

“If we’re trying to lower the cost of drugs, trying to lower the cost of care, putting a tax like this as Obamacare did on prescription drugs, just adds to the problem.

“It has raised taxes all across the board—and I don’t want to go through each and every one of the taxes. But suffice it to say, when President Obama said he would put this program in place and it wouldn’t cost a single dime. He forgot the trillion dollars in new taxes that he added onto the backs of hardworking Americans.

“So we’ve had higher taxes, we’ve had higher premiums, we’ve had higher out-of-pocket costs for people, this huge tax burden.

“We need to do a reform. The House has passed reform and the Senate, we’re working on our own health care reform bill.

“We’ve been meeting three times a week, over five hours a week, for the last month and a half. Going through piece by piece of the different components of the health care law trying to address the issues that are facing the American people.

“I’m really encouraged about the debate we’ve been having.

“We’ve been taking good steps in trying to address the issues the American people are seeing in terms of higher premiums and fewer choices.

“I would like to work with the Democrats to solve these problems in a bipartisan way—to talk about how people can actually get health care in this country.

“But what have the Democrats done in response? Well it’s interesting, because they want to go to a single-payer health care system.

“A majority of the Democrats in the House have cosponsored legislation to go to a single-payer health care plan.

“And it’s modeled after in some ways what you’re seeing in California.

“It’s hard to get cooperation from somebody to work on dealing with a health care plan when their plan is to go more government, more spending money that they don’t have.

“We’re going to continue to work toward the goal of making sure that people get the care that they need from a doctor they choose, at lower costs.”

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