Contact: Ian Martorana

WASHINGTON – This morning, Congressman Ryan joined WISN’s Dan O’Donnell and WCLO’s Tim Bremel to discuss meaningful reforms and policies passed by the House of Representatives during the 115th Congress.

Passing important bills for the American people:

We’re busy passing lots of bills and lots of reforms like we campaigned on and said we would. This congress, we’ve passed 158 bills. Compare that to the Obama administration where they were rocking and rolling in their first 150 days where they passed 131 bills.”

“Thirty seven of those are already in law. We have repealed and replaced Dodd-Frank. . . . We passed an overhaul of career and technical education. This week: Kate’s Law, sanctuary cities, medical liability reform.”

“What matters to me is we deliver results, we improve peoples’ lives, and we make good on the promises we made when we campaigned.”

Instituting regulatory reforms to unleash our economic potential:

“There is this tool called the Congressional Review Act where Congress can go and look at a recent regulation and rescind it if it is bad for jobs and business. . . . Rolling back harmful regulations; things that open up energy . . . for example. But we’ve also passed the Financial CHOICE Act. The community banks in Wisconsin are pretty much where most of our businesses get their capital. The problem we have is . . . Dodd-Frank [has] resulted in making big banks a whole lot bigger. It codifies this too-big-to-fail doctrine where we will have tax payer bailout of massive banks if they go down, which we think is wrong. And it makes it really hard for small community banks to stay in business to survive the regulations. Wisconsin is a small community bank state.”

“A lot of time—and this is a Janesville story—you will have a rotary or a member of the Kiwanis Club who is a banker who knows a small business person who is a person of good character, who is working hard, who needs to get a loan to expand their business, and that banker will take the risk on that person. Dodd-Frank makes it almost impossible to do that, so it is really drying out capital and hurting job creation.”

Progressing on health care reform:

“We are going to have another round of double digit premium increases next year, just like last year. [Obamacare] is collapsing and so we have to step in front of that and rescue people from the failure of this law. That is what this debate is about: How do we lower premiums, give people more choices, and make sure that those protections for people with pre-existing conditions are maintained? And we, in Wisconsin, had a good risk pool system in place and we want to return to that so that we can have comprehensive, affordable coverage for people with catastrophic illnesses.”

“They get good coverage when they get sick without going bankrupt, and by having that kind of coverage in place, you dramatically lower the price of insurance for everybody else, and make it more competitive.”

“What we’re saying [is] everyone in the individual market [gets] a refundable tax credit, meaning it doesn’t matter what your tax liability is or if you have one. We’ll give you a tax incentive like a health savings account to pay for out-of-pocket under deductible costs. And then we’ll have extra money for the high-risk pools as I just described to cover the costs of people with catastrophic illnesses. And we think that’s just a smarter way to go because it will make sure everyone can get affordable care and access to care, including a person with a preexisting condition.”

“So that’s what we are trying to get right, and that’s what this is really all about. So I have confidence that the Senate is going to get it done. We just want to get it right because it is very, very important.”

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