Contrary to Republican claims, the process that led to the passage of the Affordable Care Act was one of the most transparent in our nation's history. Below is a selection of points to refute many claims House Republicans are expected to make at today's hearing.
FACT: The ACA had a historic number of hours of debate and amendments during Committee development of the legislations.
The House process spanned three committees - Energy and Commerce, Ways and means, and Education and Labor - with dozens of hearings over many months.
Specifically, the House held 79 bipartisan hearings and markups on the health reform bill over the period of an entire year.
House members spent nearly 100 hours in hearings, heard from 181 witnesses from both sides of the aisle, considered 239 amendments (both Democratic and Republican), and accepted 121 amendments.
FACT: The Senate held dozens of public meetings and hearings in both the Finance and HELP Committees and accepted hundreds of Republican amendments.
The HELP Committee held 14 bipartisan roundtables, 13 bipartisan hearings, and 20 bipartisan walkthroughs on health reform.
The HELP Committee considered nearly 300 amendments and accepted more than 160 Republican amendments.
The Finance Committee held 17 roundtables, summits, and hearings on health reform. The Finance Committee also held 13 member meetings and walkthroughs and 38 meetings and negotiations for a total of 53 meetings on health reform. [Senate Finance Committee, 5/3/10]
The Finance Committee held a seven-day markup of the bill, the longest Finance Committee markup in 22 years, resulting in a bipartisan 14-to-9 vote to approve the bill. [Senate Finance Committee, 5/3/10]
The Finance Committee markup resulted in 41 amendments to revise the bill, including 18 by unanimous consent or without objection. [Senate Finance Committee, 10/13/09]
FACT: The financing of the ACA's coverage provisions was well known and debated.
When the bill came to the floor, the Senate spent 25 consecutive days in session on health reform, the second longest consecutive session in history. In total, the Senate spent more than 160 hours considering the health reform legislation.
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office issued many reports on the Affordable Care Act's financing, clearly showing that revenue would be raised by the personal responsibility provision, also known at the individual mandate or free-rider penalty, in every case that it described the law's coverage provisions. [CBO, 12/10; The Washington Post, 9/24/14; ASPE, 9/24/14]
CBO also wrote extensively about how a properly-functioning insurance market would work as designed under the ACA. The entire purpose of insurance is to balance out the risk of healthy and non-healthy enrollees; anyone who believes that this point was avoided during debate of the ACA was simply not paying attention to advocates of the law as they described it during the many public hearings the law received.
