The House Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit Subcommittee met last week to discuss several bills aimed at improving the regulatory environment, including one that would change the asset threshold used to deem a bank as systemically important.

Introduced by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO), the Systemic Risk Designation Improvement Act of 2017 replaces the $50 billion asset threshold used in Dodd-Frank to designate firms as “systemically important financial institutions” with an indicator-based measurement approach based on a particular institution’s size, interconnectedness, cross-jurisdictional activity, substitutability, and complexity.

They also examined the Practice of Law Technical Clarification Act of 2017, introduced by Rep. Dave Trott (R-MI), which would amend the fair Debt Collection Practices Act to exclude law firms and licensed attorneys who are engaged in the practice of law from the definition of a debt collector.  This bill also amends the Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2010 to prevent the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection from exercising supervisory or enforcement authority with respect to attorneys when engaged in the practice of law and not providing consumer financial products or services.

Check out the full article here.

WASHINGTON — House Judiciary Committee members plan to roll out legislation after the August recess to eliminate an Obama era initiative that pressured financial institutions to drop accounts with businesses the administration found to be reprehensible.

Known as Operation Choke Point, the Obama Justice Department began pressuring financial institutions in 2013 to deny accounts for legal business operations like firearms dealers, payday lenders, porn merchants and drug paraphernalia vendors. The initiative essentially “choked” off these industries from mainstream banking institutions, sending them to cash only or smaller financial firms willing to take their business.

Missouri Republican Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer reintroduced the bill last month to end Operation Choke Point. Luetkemeyer expects a hearing and then a markup of the bill after the August recess. (RELATED: Lawmaker Reintroduces Bill To Eliminate Operation Choke Point)

“Basically, what’s happening is the DOJ and or the FDIC are intimidating the banks and cutting off financial services to certain business or entire industries of business that the FDIC and the DOJ don’t think morally have the right to exist. That’s their words not mine. Those are in their emails, and the reason that they’re putting the pressure on the banks to do this,” Luetkemeyer told TheDC Monday night.

The Missouri Republican explained further, “The bill was incorporated in the CHOICE Act. And we want to see how far it goes. So, we’re kind of get a little direction from the Senate. If they include it in their financial reform bill, then it won’t be necessary, but we filed a bill to be able to offer it if we see that the CHOICE Act is going to stall over [in the Senate].”

House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, Luetkemeyer and California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa met with members of industries harmed by Operation Choke Point last Friday. Jamie Fulmer senior vice president of public affairs at Advance America, a payday lending firm, was one of the attendees at the round table told The Daily Caller last Friday how the Obama era initiative hurt his company’s business.

“Since 2013 our company has lost 21 banking relationships and so, you know, at the core, the issue is that it was not based on any fundamental reason other than a high-ranking official at several regulatory agencies that found personal disfavor with you. They would use their authority and get these regulatory entities to leverage their regulatory authority over the banks and force them to cease banking relationships,” Fulmer said.

He added, “Every time we lose a bank it creates a new whole host of problems and underscored by the fact that at the end of last year in November we lost our largest remaining national bank, which was U.S. Bank, which roughly banked about 60 percent of our centers. We were given, without notice without warning, three months to terminate these accounts.”

Thanks @BobGoodlatte6 for joining in the Operation Choke Point roundtable. We heard from those impacted & will work to end this program. pic.twitter.com/Cyjih3Cgjh

— Blaine Luetkemeyer (@RepBlainePress) June 23, 2017

Fulmer was among several individuals from industries at the roundtable on Capitol Hill last Friday discussing with lawmakers how Operation Choke Point harmed their businesses.

“For us, it’s a fundamental business issue. Without banking services, we can’t meet our depository needs in our 2,000 centers across the country. We have difficulty making our payroll payments to our employees as well as a payment processing to our vendors and landlord. Things like that,” said Fulmer. “You know we’ve lost five banking relationships in the last year, and while a company of our size has been able to cobble together a complex network of workarounds to keep our doors open, it is very uncertain whether or not these work-arounds are sustainable.”

California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa told TheDC on Monday why pushing these businesses to cash only circumstances makes it more difficult to track those who end up committing crimes and terrorist acts.

“In the global war on terror or one of the most important tools of the of the bad people is can. We monitor money in order to have tractability of terrorism,” Issa said. “By taking people out of banking relationships, we force them into a cash underground economy, so it’s a national security issue — rather than to take at risk companies out of banking but actually to put them into banking.”

The House Financial Services Committee today approved five bills as part of a legislative package intended to reauthorize the National Flood Insurance Program.

Lawmakers unanimously approved two American Bankers Association-supported bills: H.R. 2875, the National Flood Insurance Program Administrative Reform Act of 2017, which would make administrative changes to the NFIP to increase fairness and accuracy, and decrease taxpayer risk; and H.R. 1422, the Flood Insurance Market Parity and Modernization Act, which would encourage development of a robust private flood insurance market as an alternative to the NFIP. The committee also approved by a voice vote H.R. 1558, a bill introduced by Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) to amend the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968 to ensure community accountability for areas repeatedly damaged by floods.

Additionally, the committee passed two bills introduced by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.), H.R. 2264 and H.R. 2565, both of which ABA strongly supported. H.R. 2264, the Taxpayer Exposure Mitigation Act of 2017, would enable the NFIP to engage in private-sector risk transfer deals and would allow the development of private or community flood maps as an alternative to NFIP’s outdated maps. H.R. 2565 would require the NFIP to study how it uses replacement costs in setting premiums.

Together with H.R. 2874 and H.R. 2868, which were passed by the committee last week, the bills will now move to the full House for consideration. ABA will continue to work closely with lawmakers to ensure that the NFIP is renewed prior to its expiration date on Sept. 30.

House lawmakers are weighing seven proposals to renew and reform the federal flood insurance program, an area where there is a good amount of bipartisan agreement that something should be done and even on what to do.

The House Financial Services Committee, chaired by Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) is meeting today to mark-up legislation to reauthorize the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which is set to expire on Sept. 30, and to reform the program that is $24 billion in debt.

The mark-up session had originally been scheduled for yesterday but was postponed due to the shooting in Virginia in which House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) and four other people were injured.

In addition to renewing the NFIP, the various proposals aim to put the program on stronger financial footing, remove obstacles to greater private insurer participation in the market, limit payments for properties that flood repeatedly, reduce taxpayer subsidies, provide aid for those unable to afford coverage, improve flood mapping, encourage mitigation efforts and overhaul claims handling.

Chairman Hensarling opened the session with a promise to keep taxpayers’ interests at the forefront of the debate.

“There are so many important voices in our debate today on the reauthorization of the National Flood Insurance Program. Certainly the homeowners who have relied on this program — theirs is a very important voice because we go to their homes and we go to their household finances. Theirs is a very important voice. Homebuilders, they have an important voice. Insurance agents and companies, local communities — these are all important voices in this debate. But as far as I’m concerned, perhaps the single-most important voice is the voice that remains underrepresented in the debate and that is the voice of the American taxpayer,” Hensarling said.

He said he believes that homeowners should gradually be expected to pay actuarial rates. “They need predictability. We need to protect them from sticker shock, but the program must be made sustainable,” he said.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif), the highest ranking Democrat on the committee, said she was disappointed that there had not been more bipartisan agreement on some of the measures and expressed concern that the package of bills might actually “make matters worse by restricting coverage, increasing costs, and opening the door to cherry-picking by the private sector.”

Waters also maintained that the process has been rushed and the bills are “replete” with technical errors.

“One important question is this: when all of these bills are put together, what will be the cumulative impact on cost for policyholders? What is this going to cost these communities? Mr. Chairman, when you add up all the premium increases, surcharges, assessments, cross-subsidies, and rate-changes, how will affordability be affected?” Waters asked in her opening statement.

Major Proposal

The major bill, H.R. 2874, the National Flood Insurance Program Policyholder Protection Act of 2017, is a broad proposal that incorporates many of the ideas in individual bills. Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance, introduced a draft last month.

Its provisions aim to put the NFIP on stronger financial footing; provide aid for those unable to afford coverage; improve flood mapping, mitigation efforts and claims handling; and encourage greater private insurer participation in the market.

The far-reaching draft reflects ideas from Republicans and Democrats, advocates for consumers and taxpayers, as well as ideas from the insurance, banking and real estate industries.

The U.S. P/C industry’s major trade associations, however, oppose several provisions in the draft legislation that they say could harm private sector involvement.

The National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, American Insurance Association and Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America recently jointly signed a letter to the Committee on Financial Services drawing attention to how the draft legislation would affect the Write-Your-Own Program, which uses the private insurance agents and companies to sell and service NFIP policies.

WYO companies and agents write 86 percent of all NFIP policies affecting 4.29 million policy holders. But the property/casualty trade associations are afraid that the draft House legislation would reduce private sector WYO activity by adding new regulatory burdens for WYO companies and agents while simultaneously lowering the reimbursements they get for their services.

The National Association of Professional Insurance Agents (PIA) has also come out in opposition to the proposed changes in the reimbursement percentage, which is used by carriers to pay administrative expenses as well as agent commissions.

According to PIA National, the reimbursement rate would drop from 30.9 percent to 27.9 percent over three years.

“One of the goals of reforming the NFIP is to increase sales of policies, especially preferred risk policies, to put the program on a firmer financial footing,” said Jon Gentile, vice president of government relations of PIA National. “Reducing agent compensation undermines that goal by applying a disincentive to increasing sales. It could lead to an exodus of qualified independent agents from the flood program, similar to the one that occurred from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) when agent commissions were cut.”

Other Bills

One of the individual bills is H.R. 1422, the Flood Insurance Market Parity and Modernization Act, which was introduced by U.S. Rep. Dennis A. Ross (R-Fla.). It aims to encourage the development of a private flood insurance market. by removing restrictions and give states more flexibility to license and regulate private flood insurance. This legislation is supported by a number of stakeholders including the Realtors, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, and a coalition of taxpayer advocates, environmental groups, housing organizations and mitigation advocates.

HR 1558, the Repeatedly Flooded Communities Preparation Act, introduced by Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) and Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.). This bill proposes to limit NFIP payments on claims for properties flooded multiple times.

“A tiny number of properties that are flooded and rebuilt over-and-over again are responsible for a massive chunk of the indebted NFIP’s spending. Any serious effort by Congress to reform the Program and make it less of a drain on taxpayers needs to address repeatedly flooded properties and reward local communities making progress on mitigation,” said Royce.

As of January 2016, there were more than 150,000 structures around the country classified as repetitive loss properties by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). FEMA estimates that these properties comprise just one percent of those insured by the NFIP, but represent 25 to 30 percent of all flood claims.

Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Missouri) is advocating for his H.R.2246, the Taxpayer Exposure Mitigation Act of 2017, which would require more community involvement in mapping, mandate that FEMA purchase reinsurance or some capital market alternative to protect taxpayers from footing the bill for future losses, and allow businesses to opt-out of mandated requirements and more easily purchase private flood coverage. FEMA has already begun a reinsurance purchasing program. FEMA announced in January that it had it has secured more than $1 billion in reinsurance from a group of 25 reinsurers.

Leutkemeyer has also submitted H.R. 2565, which would require the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to look at properties on an individual basis and incorporate a structure’s actual replacement cost in National Flood Insurance Program policies.

An ongoing online poll of InsuranceJournal.com readers suggests that opening the market to private insurers could benefit taxpayers the most. Thirty-seven percent of 327 respondents said taxpayers have the most to gain from shifting policies to the private sector, with private insurers (20 percent) and policyholders (19 percent) next in line as beneficiaries.

Both Democrats and Republicans cited concern about hurting low-income homeowners in legislation that would reauthorize the National Flood Insurance Program, but they also agreed that the program, with a current debt of $24.6 billion, needs to be on sounder financial ground.

Lawmakers are working to beat the expiration of the current authorization on Sept. 30. Without new authorization in place, housing markets in coastal and flood-prone areas could be disrupted.

Democrats complained that draft legislation, consisting partly of three bills, wouldn’t provide funds for flood risk mitigation and would increase rates for the poorest homeowners.

Besides the program’s long-term debt, much of it racked up from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 and Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the program will run an average annual deficit of $1.4 billion, said Rep. Jeb Hensarling, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, which held a hearing Wednesday on the draft legislation.

“It is unsustainable,” the Texas Republican said.

Among the program’s problems are that the NFIP has a monopoly and private insurers don’t compete in the market, and also that more than half of the program’s costs are commissions paid to private insurance agents who sell policies, and other non-claims costs. Hensarling urged “fiscal conservatives” to consider changes aimed at mitigating risks.

“This is a problem that is not going away and there is a better, smarter way to handle flood insurance,” he said, noting that the NFIP’s 5.1 million policies are, in effect, subsidized by the 96 percent of Americans who don’t own homes in flood plains.

Proposed changes include increasing the participation by private companies in flood insurance markets to spread risk and potentially reduce the program’s overall cost. One provision, introduced earlier this year by Reps. Dennis A. Ross, R-Fla., and Kathy Castor, D-Fla., as a stand-alone bill, would allow private flood insurance coverage to satisfy mandatory flood insurance requirements in participating areas. Private insurers that already write and service standard National Flood Insurance Program policies would be able to sell their own flood coverage.

The reauthorization proposal includes a bill from Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-Mo., that would direct the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the overseer of the National Flood Insurance Program, to use reinsurance as a way to reduce direct taxpayer exposure to the program’s risks and losses.

The draft would direct FEMA to find ways to save money when creating flood maps used to assess premiums. One provision under consideration would allow use of locally created flood maps, rather than federally created maps, if they meet FEMA standards. In fiscal 2016, Congress appropriated $190 million for flood map creation. Panel members say the federal cost of maps would be lower if they were created and paid for locally.

Reauthorization of the NFIP will have to include changes to make flood mapping fairer and to address claims concerns raised by Superstorm Sandy victims, said Rep. Sean P. Duffy, the Wisconsin Republican who is chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance. “I think it’s going to need a coalition of Republicans and Democrats working together to make sure we have those reforms in this bill.”

Duffy said he intended to encourage bipartisan efforts when he released the discussion draft of the reauthorization bill two weeks ago. He cut that bill into six pieces, including the three bills and including sections on encouraging private insurers and raising rates.

Duffy complained Wednesday about the program’s “grandfathering” of long-term policyholders, who pay low premiums even though their homes would not meet current building codes. Among those with grandfathered policies are people owning multimillion dollar homes, while low-income homeowners suffer greater rate increases, he said.

“We have poor people subsidizing rich people,” Duffy said. “I find that to be outrageous.”

While there are provisions in the draft that reflect bipartisan agreement, the bill “absolutely falls short in many respects,” said California Rep. Maxine Waters, the committee’s ranking Democrat and co-author of the last five-year authorization. The bill’s lack of mitigation funding, and its reliance instead on local communities to find ways to pay to build levees and invest in other flood protection measures, are also unacceptable, she said.

Waters urged a long-term reauthorization, as opposed to short-term extensions that disrupt markets, and the provision of “robust affordability assistance to those who may literally lose their homes if we do not act.” She and Duffy spent much of the two-hour-plus hearing Wednesday huddled in discussion.

Duffy said there were meetings scheduled with Democrats “to hopefully be able to hammer out a bipartisan deal. I think that would be great in this partisan environment, taking a bipartisan bill” to the floor.

Providing testimony at the hearing was Caitlin Berni, a vice president with Greater New Orleans Inc., a member of the Coalition for Sustainable Flood Insurance, a group of 250 organizations formed during Congress’ 2012 effort at overhauling the program.

Berni said the coalition is concerned about the ongoing affordability of the program for poorer homeowners. Raising the minimum annual increase to 8 percent will “have a detrimental effect on premium affordability.” The bill also would limit rate increases to a maximum of 15 percent a year.

Another witness, Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, opposed the proposal to set “an artificial rate cap,” but liked provisions that would make risk assessments more transparent to policyholders so that they can take steps to reduce their risks and premiums. Ellis also complained that an NFIP study found that in many areas, wealthy homeowners were the ones who most often received subsidized premiums because of their grandfathered status.

Ellis called the draft legislation a “thoughtful legislative start.”

A common criticism of calls to open up the market to private insurers is that they would cherry-pick wealthy homeowners who can afford private insurance, while leaving the already struggling NFIP with poorer, often subsidized, policyholders.

But NFIP policyholders are those who must get flood insurance because they live in a flood plain and face at least a 1 percent annual chance of flooding, said R.J. Lehmann, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank R Street Institute.

“This is a high-risk cohort,” he said of NFIP customers. “There are, by and large, no cherries to pick.”

Besides the House bills under consideration by the Financial Services Committee, a draft Senate reauthorization measure, proposed by Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy and New York Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, is being discussed in that chamber. While the Senate proposal calls for a 10-year reauthorization, it contains similar provisions to the House version.

Senate Banking Chairman Michael D. Crapo of Idaho has said that reauthorizing the program before it expires is one of his top priorities.

The legislation, approved by the U.S. House of Representatives during the 114th Congress, would prevent federal agencies from ordering financial institutions to terminate banking relationships without “material reason.”

U.S. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-Mo., is continuing his effort to curb Operation Choke Point by introducing H.R. 2706, the Financial Institution Consumer Protection Act, in the 115^th Congress.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Financial Institution Customer Protection Act, which would end Operation Choke Point, in a 250-169 bipartisan vote in February 2016. The bill, which ACA International supported, prohibits federal regulators from directly or indirectly coercing banks to terminate relationships with legitimate business entities “unless the regulator has material reason,” ACA previously reported.

“Last Congress, the House of Representatives took the first step in putting an end, once and for all, to Operation Choke Point by passing my legislation,” Luetkemeyer said in a May 25 news release. “Although there is a new Administration and Department of Justice (DOJ) in place, this legislation is necessary to ensure that no future Administration will have the opportunity to negatively impact individuals and legal businesses through this unprecedented initiative. We must continue to demand greater transparency and end the practice of allowing government bureaucrats to use personal and political motivations to block financial services to licensed, legally-operating businesses.”

Operation Choke Point is a program in which the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and DOJ reportedly applied pressure to financial institutions in order to cut off financial services to certain licensed, legally operating industries, including debt collection. The House Financial Services Committee passed the Financial Institution Customer Protection Act of 2015 (H.R. 766) by a 35-19 vote in June 2015.

In April 2015, ACA International’s Board of Directors unanimously voted to support legislation and policy changes that would bring an end to Operation Choke Point. In June, ACA launched a grassroots campaign in which nearly 2,000 members sent emails to 340 members of Congress urging them to end Operation Choke Point.

Luetkemeyer, a speaker at ACA International’s Washington Insights Conferences, discussed Operation Choke Point with ACA members during the event in 2015.

According to the news release from Luetkemeyer’s office, “the Financial Institution Customer Protection Act would dictate that agencies such as the (FDIC) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, among others, could not request or order a financial institution to terminate a banking relationship unless the regulator has material reason. Any account termination requests or orders would be required to be made in writing and rely on information other than reputational risk. In addition, the legislation strikes the word “affecting” in the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act (FIRREA), replacing it with “by” or “against.” This is to ensure that the (DOJ’s) once broad interpretation of the law is limited and the original intent of the statute is restored.”

ACA International will continue to follow the status of the legislation and keep ACA members apprised of developments

Follow ACA on Twitter @ACAIntl and @acacollector or Facebook for news and event updates. ACA’s LinkedIn Group includes news updates, member discussions, event promotions, jobs and more. Visit the group page and request to join today. Subscribe to ACA Daily, Collector magazine and update your communications preferences by logging in to ACA’s website here. ACA members can get email notifications when each new digital issue of Collector magazine is available by logging in here; members and nonmembers can also purchase a print subscription. Nonmembers can create a guest profile on ACA’s website to subscribe to available publications.

As the 115th Congress gets underway, the Regional Bank Coalition is calling for comprehensive regulatory reform with a focus on retooling the Dodd-Frank Act’s definition of systemically risky banks beyond asset size.

A bill that would accomplish that, the Systemic Risk Designation Improvement Act, was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives twice in past years. Sponsored by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO), the most recent bill passed the House in December 2016 as H.R. 6392.

The legislation seeks to roll back the stipulation in Dodd-Frank that authorizes the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) to subject banks with $50 billion or more in assets to more stringent regulatory requirements and significant compliance costs.

A Federal Financial Analytics study said that provision has reduced the amount of capital regional banks can lend by as much as $20 billion over a five year period.

The Luetkemeyer bills, which RBC supports, say FSOC should look not just at size, but at a variety of risk factors. Luetkemeyer said the current systemically important financial institution (SIFI) designation process is arbitrary and subjects regional banks to the same standards as trillion-dollar global banks. The SIFI designation refers to financial institutions that could pose a threat to the financial stability of the United States if they failed.

Regional banks are mainly funded by deposits, conduct limited trading, and have little exposure to derivatives. As a result, those institutions argue they lack the systemic risk that fueled the 2008 financial crisis.

On the asset spectrum, regional banks fall between the small community banks and the large mega banks. Many regional banks are over that $50 billion threshold, falling somewhere between the $50 billion and $250 billion asset range. However, they are just the fraction of the size of the large banks like J.P. Morgan, which has some $2.5 trillion in assets.

“Regional banks are caught up in this one-size-fits-all regulatory regime that has had real detrimental effects to them and their downstream customers,” Matt Well, spokesperson for the Regional Bank Coalition, told Financial Regulation News.

Instead of looking purely at asset size, RBC supports legislation that looks at various risk factors, including size (total asset number), interconnectedness (ties to other banks/financial institutions), complexity (where the assets lie), global activity (domestic vs. international assets), and substitutability (dominance in certain customer services).

Some have suggested simply raising the threshold from $50 billion to $250 billion, for example, but RBC said that still would not sufficiently address the issue.

“Our view is that you need to take all of those factors into account,” Well said, noting the concept was not created by Luetkemeyer or RBC, but rather was developed by the Financial Stability Board and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.

The challenge is getting the bill reintroduced into a busy and crowded 115th Congress. The Financial Choice Act is expected to be reintroduced this year and will likely be a legislative priority. The Financial Choice Act was introduced in the previous Congress to lift some of the excessive regulatory burdens of Dodd-Frank on banks and credit unions.

While RBC supports much of the Financial Choice Act, it does not directly address the risk-based, multi-factored approach to enhanced supervision that the coalition champions, Well said.

But RBC is hopeful that a reintroduced Systemic Risk Designation Improvement Act would gain traction. H.R. 6392 passed the House with bipartisan support, one of only a few pieces of Dodd-Frank reforms to gain Democratic backing.

In a Feb. 13 letter addressed to House and Senate leaders, RBC’s member companies noted comments from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on that issue.

The letter quotes Mnuchin as saying, “I believe in a regulatory framework that is determined by complexity and activity, not simply size. I endorse rethinking regulatory requirements facing large regional banks in order to regulate the banking sector in a more effective manner.”

The letter also urges political leaders to address comprehensive reform of the regulatory landscape and corporate taxes, and eliminate government-mandated price controls from the marketplace that dictate the cost of debit card transactions.

U.S. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer voted in support of taking the first step to repeal Obamacare and to start the process of reforming our nation’s failed health-care system.

“Obamacare has failed and the American people have spoken,” Luetkemeyer said. “It has failed individuals, families, and small businesses across our state and Congress has responded to this failure by taking the first steps to repealing this broken law.

“The numbers are staggering. Average annual family premiums in the employer sponsored market have increased by roughly $4,300 and now total more than $18,000 annually and individual premiums are up 27 percent. Since 2010, 80 rural hospitals have been forced to close their doors across America – and there are many more closures on the horizon. “