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unidentified
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Response and viewer reaction. | |
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| Well, up next, Democratic senators discuss possible effects of cuts to Medicaid and efforts to maintain funding. | ||
| This news conference is about 40 minutes. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. | ||
| Last night, the president falsely claimed he would not cut Medicaid and tried to paper over his party's very plan to cut Medicaid. | ||
| This lie lasted all of 12 hours. | ||
| This morning, we saw exactly what we knew all along. | ||
| The Republican Party is united in their drive to cut Medicaid and rip health care from millions of seniors, disabled Americans, children, and so many more. | ||
| This in and of itself is troubling and against the wishes of the American people, but it gets worse. | ||
| And at the very center of it all, their ultimate goal, what everything is working towards, is a massive tax break for the very wealthy. | ||
| That is the whole ballgame. | ||
| This whole process to find room in the budget for those cuts is consuming the House, the Senate, and the White House. | ||
| The White House is scrambling, sometimes illegally, to fire doctors at the VA, lay off cancer researchers, and so much more. | ||
| Republicans in Congress are haggling over whether they're going to do this in one bill or two bills. | ||
| The Senate and House are fighting each other to see who should go first. | ||
| To be honest, none of that process really matters to the people of my state. | ||
| What matters is this: who gets the tax cuts and who is going to pay for it. | ||
| So today, we land on their number one target to pay for these tax breaks, Medicaid. | ||
| Medicaid provides health care to over 70 million Americans, including over 30 million children and 8 million seniors. | ||
| Medicaid provides essential care for about 10 million adults with disabilities. | ||
| Medicaid helps almost two-thirds of all nursing home residents have a safe roof over their heads. | ||
| And the list goes on. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Congressional Republicans are ripping away health care from our most vulnerable to fund tax breaks for their wealthy friends. | ||
| Now, the Republicans know that cutting this program is a political vulnerability. | ||
| They know that taking health care away from a grandmother or a low-income kid is not going to poll well. | ||
| They basically said as much. | ||
| So they are already lying about their plans and saying these cuts will be painless, only going after fraud and abuse. | ||
| Well, let me be the first to say that these cuts will not be painless for the hundreds of rural hospitals that rely on Medicaid to keep their doors open. | ||
| And it won't be painless for the 15 million Americans living with disabilities or the 5.6 million seniors who are in long-term care who would have their insurance ripped away. | ||
| And it won't be painless for the more than 20 million Americans who could lose their insurance if congressional Republicans come after Medicaid expansion. | ||
| These cuts won't just impact red or blue states. | ||
| Wisconsin will be hit just like its neighbors. | ||
| For instance, in both Wisconsin and Iowa, about 20% of our population gets health care from Medicaid. | ||
| Americans everywhere will feel their health care being ripped away. | ||
| And when they do, it's Republicans who will have to explain to their constituents why. | ||
| And there's a simple answer. | ||
| To give tax breaks to billionaires, they are taking away your health care so that rich people don't have to pay their fair share. | ||
| Donald Trump promised to lower costs for American families. | ||
| He lied. | ||
| Now he is going to kick grandmothers and children off their health care, jacking up costs for families and going against the wishes of over 70% of the American people who want Medicaid protected, including a majority of Republicans. | ||
| So I am here to ask my Republican colleagues and the President some questions. | ||
| Are they planning to kick a grandmother off her health care or a vulnerable child, a decorated veteran, or a hardworking single mother of three? | ||
| Gut funding for nursing homes and rural hospitals? | ||
| This is a warning to our colleagues. | ||
| Hands off Medicaid. | ||
| While Republicans bend over backwards to pad the pockets of billionaires, I'll stand up for working families in my state and across this country. | ||
| Cuts of this size will endanger the health and lives of millions of Americans. | ||
| I, for one, plan to stand up for my constituents and call out this massive grift. | ||
| And now I'd like to turn it over to Senator Peter Welch. | ||
| Thank you, Senator Baldwin. | ||
| I'll answer those questions. | ||
| The answer is yes. | ||
| They want to stiff our veterans. | ||
| Yes, they want to evict the grandmother from the nursing home. | ||
| It's really astonishing what's happened in this last month. | ||
| The President has gone on a lawless rampage. | ||
| He's totally disregarding the authority of Congress on the budget. | ||
| Regrettably, our Republican colleagues are relinquishing their authority and responsibility as an independent branch of government. | ||
| The President is saying things like Ukraine started the war. | ||
| When I talk to Vermonters, their heads are spinning. | ||
| There's no stable ground underneath them. | ||
| And they wonder what he's up to. | ||
| And what he is up to is trying to achieve the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth priority of his administration, cutting taxes for billionaires. | ||
| Literally, that's what he's doing. | ||
| The math doesn't add up, and the only way he's going to be able to do it is go after Medicaid. | ||
| And he's all in on doing that. | ||
| And it's really an appalling agenda. | ||
| Now, when you think back about his address at the inaugural, I didn't hear anything about affordability. | ||
| I didn't hear anything about working families trying to deal with child care. | ||
| I didn't hear anything about the cost of housing, which in every one of our states is brutal. | ||
| I didn't hear anything about affordability. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| And then he gets into office, supposedly loving Medicaid, supposedly being a tribune of working folks who are having trouble at the end of the month paying their bills. | ||
| And the number one agenda item for him is cutting taxes for billionaires. | ||
| The families be damned. | ||
| These Medicaid cuts are brutal on each one of our states, but in Vermont, we've got about 20-25 percent of our families who get Medicaid. | ||
| And it's kids. | ||
| You know, why not stiff them? | ||
| And it's a lot of older folks who are in the nursing homes. | ||
| Two out of the three beds we have in Vermont are Medicaid supported. | ||
| So this is going to be trauma. | ||
| Trauma for the families directly affected. | ||
| Trauma for the state budgets, where each of us has legislatures that are trying to keep things together in the onslaught of the Trump attacks. | ||
| So bottom line here, the agenda is clear. | ||
| It is really tax cuts for billionaires. | ||
| And the kind of love that President Trump has for Medicaid is apparently a love that doesn't include keeping that grandmother in her nursing home. | ||
| It's the kind of love that says to an eight-year-old who has severe illnesses, hey, kid, you are on your own, and it'll all work out with my big, beautiful tax cut bill. | ||
| We are here to say, no, we are going to fight every way that we can to stop this travesty from occurring. | ||
| And now I'd like to turn it over to our wonderful colleague from Washington State, a champion of everything good, Senator Murray. | ||
| Everything good. | ||
| Everything good. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, from mass-firing public health experts to freezing funding for our community health centers to slashing medical research to ending support to enroll people in health coverage to putting a vaccine skeptic in charge of the nation's health care department, Trump is already doing massive damage to health care in America. | ||
| Massive. | ||
| But Senate Republicans are clearly determined not to be outdone. | ||
| This week, they are gearing up for phase one of their plan to sell out the health care of working families in order to give tax breaks to billionaires. | ||
| It's bad enough that they're ignoring the health care cliff coming this year because remember right now we have millions of people saving thousands of dollars a year on health care because of the tax credits that Democrats passed. | ||
| Have Republicans said a peep about extending that aid with their own signature bill? | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| They are perfectly content to let help for working families expire and let health care costs skyrocket. | ||
| But the second a multi-billionaire like Elon Musk is at risk of losing a cent in tax breaks, Republicans apparently will move heaven and earth. | ||
| That's bad enough, truly, but it gets worse because the Republican plan isn't just to let support families need expire. | ||
| The plan is to cut off their health care. | ||
| Republicans have made clear they will not hesitate to bleed health care programs dry if it means that they can shower more tax cuts on billionaires and big corporations. | ||
| House Republicans have already spoken openly about their interest in cutting health care. | ||
| They've left no doubt Medicaid is on the chopping block. | ||
| Meanwhile, the Senate budget resolution calls for cutting $1 trillion this year alone and $9 trillion over the 10 years. | ||
| Where are those cuts going to come from? | ||
| If billionaires are getting the benefit, we need to ask who's paying the cost. | ||
| Every day Americans are going to pay in shuttered community health centers. | ||
| They're going to pay the cost in canceled clinical trials. | ||
| They're going to pay with less access to birth control and cancer screenings and weaker public health departments. | ||
| And that is just the start. | ||
| They're also going to pay when millions of families with the tightest budgets have health care ripped away from them. | ||
| The cold, hard reality is that Republicans are going to cut this deeply and painfully to extend tax cuts for billionaires. | ||
| They will have to cut things like veterans' health care, Medicare, and Medicaid. | ||
| Every time Republicans have tried this, including in Trump's first term, the American people have made extremely clear: don't sabotage our health care and don't jack up our costs. | ||
| So Republicans may be charging down the same dangerous path once again. | ||
| And once again, Democrats are not going to be silent, and nor will the American people. | ||
| We will stand up. | ||
| We will fight tooth and nail to protect the health care that families rely on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
With that, I will turn it over to Senator Cortez-Master. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| I am so pleased to join my colleagues today to really shine a light and bring transparency to what is happening here. | ||
| As you have heard, President Trump and his Republican allies, they just want to gut Medicaid. | ||
| It's the only way that they can pay for these billionaire tax cuts. | ||
| It is what is happening, even though Donald Trump is using sleight of hand, quite honestly. | ||
| He's not being honest with the American public. | ||
| Let me talk a little bit about that because just a few weeks ago, Donald Trump said he would love and cherish Medicaid, that he would only cut waste and fraud from this essential health care program. | ||
| But we know from history that Donald Trump has been trying and failing to dismantle Medicaid since he first got into office. | ||
| In his first term, he tried to cut Medicaid in each of his annual budget proposals. | ||
| He wasn't honest with Americans then, and he's not honest with them now. | ||
| Last night, President Trump said, and I quote, Medicaid, none of that stuff is going to be touched. | ||
| Then this morning, he endorsed the House Republican budget bill that is going to slash billions from Medicaid. | ||
| Now, actions speak louder than words, and Americans are watching. | ||
| I think all of my colleagues here are for getting rid of waste and fraud where we see it. | ||
| And listen, I served as the Attorney General for Nevada for eight years. | ||
| The Medicaid fraud unit was in my office. | ||
| It was in my office. | ||
| And we were prosecuting individuals and held them accountable for Medicaid fraud. | ||
| So I know two or three things about this, but that's not Donald Trump's plan. | ||
| That is not Donald Trump's plan. | ||
| He made it clear this morning when he endorsed a bill that would cut nearly a trillion dollars in health care for families, children, pregnant women, the disabled, and low-income seniors who rely on Medicaid. | ||
| In Nevada, that's 800,000 people who are lifted up by Medicaid. | ||
| And here is the hard truth that the Republicans and Trump administration won't admit to the American people. | ||
| They cannot fund Trump's tax scam by just cracking down on fraud, waste, and abuse, and Medicaid. | ||
| To cut nearly a trillion dollars, which their budget plan calls for, they have to gut Medicaid. | ||
| Donald is being dishonest with Americans. | ||
| It's cruel, it's dangerous, and it'll leave hundreds of thousands of Nevadans without access to affordable health care, just so billionaires can pay less in their taxes. | ||
| I want to talk a little bit about what this means for Nevada. | ||
| In Nevada, like many of my colleagues have talked about in their states, we rely on federal funding for the vast majority of our Medicaid program. | ||
| Without it, policymakers in my state will be forced to make hard choices: cutting payments to providers, cutting Nevadans' health care benefits, or both. | ||
| If my state, if Nevada is forced to cut payments to providers, that will mean more health care clinics will close. | ||
| Few doctors will be incentivized to come to work in Nevada, and the providers who remain will be forced to cover their losses by raising prices on patients. | ||
| Either way, Nevadans pay the price whether with their hard-earned money or with their health. | ||
| And by the way, it is going to hit the hardest in rural communities in rural Nevada. | ||
| Across this country, our rural communities rely on Medicaid. | ||
| And I don't care whether you're blue or a red state. | ||
| If you know people who live in rural areas like we have in Nevada, you know that quality health care can be very hard to come by. | ||
| Wherever a provider is located, no matter how far away, that's where they have to go. | ||
| In Nevada, sometimes people have to drive two, three, or four hours just to access health care in my state. | ||
| And if our rural hospital will start to close up shop because of Donald Trump's plan to gut Medicaid, it would devastate rural communities, including in Nevada, and we just cannot let that happen. | ||
| Again, we have to shine a light on what's going on here. | ||
| Yes, we are going to fight. | ||
| Yes, we are going to push back. | ||
| But most importantly, we have to make sure the American public understands. | ||
| Dishonest Don. | ||
| He is not telling the truth in what he is trying to do here. | ||
| It is a sleight of hand. | ||
| I'm from Vegas, man. | ||
| I know hustle when I see it. | ||
| And that is exactly what is happening right now. | ||
| And he's going to do it on the backs of the American public so he can help his billionaire friends. | ||
| And now, with that, I'd like to turn it over to my good friend Maggie Hassan from New Hampshire. | ||
| Well, thanks, Senator Cortez-Masto. | ||
| Like my colleagues with me here today, I am here because Granite Staters are truly alarmed by the Republicans' attempts to pay for tax breaks for billionaires by effectively ending Medicaid as we know it. | ||
| These Medicaid cuts will hurt people and communities in every corner of the country. | ||
| These cuts will harm millions of families across the country. | ||
| People who matter, and they depend on Medicaid every single day. | ||
| Who are these people on Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program? | ||
| Well, in New Hampshire, the most recent figures show that these programs cover more than 180,000 people. | ||
| That's over 10% of the population in New Hampshire, including nearly 90,000 kids. | ||
| It covers over 15,000 people with disabilities, covers nearly 10,000 seniors, and nearly 10,000 Granite Staters struggling with addiction depend on Medicaid for medication-assisted treatment, which is the gold standard for addiction care. | ||
| As Governor, when we expanded Medicaid, we did it with Republican support. | ||
| It was a bipartisan effort because even though we didn't agree on everything, we understood that we are all better off when people are healthy. | ||
| When more people are healthy, when they are free from chronic illnesses or addiction, more people can work and our economy gets stronger. | ||
| We also expanded Medicaid because we understood that in a great country like ours, there is nothing American about turning our backs on our neighbors or leaving seniors who need nursing home care to fend for themselves. | ||
| In this country, everyone should be free to get ahead and stay ahead. | ||
| This is America, and this is the country where everybody counts and matters, which means everybody needs and has to have access to quality, affordable care. | ||
| If the Republican budget passes, it will be the end of Medicaid as we know it. | ||
| More people will get sick, our economy will be weakened, and families will be hurt. | ||
| And I just want to say one other thing. | ||
| When we expanded Medicaid in New Hampshire, one of the groups of people who were really helped were people who were too sick to work. | ||
| For instance, they might have been laid off, so they didn't have health insurance anymore. | ||
| Their chronic illness got worse. | ||
| They could only get health care when it got really emergent. | ||
| Then they would sink back into chronic illness again, and they were never well enough to work, and it was this vicious cycle. | ||
| When Medicaid expansion came around, those people got health care. | ||
| And I still remember the people who came up to me and told me that they hadn't been able to look for a job or work for over a year, let's say after a layoff. | ||
| They got Medicaid expansion, they got the health care they needed, they got to work, they got off Medicaid, and they got onto private insurance. | ||
| So this is a really important program for people all across the country with chronic illness, and it's a really important program for employers who want a workforce that is ready and able and healthy enough to work. | ||
| The American people deserve to know why support for a child with asthma or treatment for someone struggling with addiction should be sacrificed to pay for another tax break for multi-billionaires. | ||
| So I urge my Republican colleagues to follow the bipartisan example we set in New Hampshire and in many other states. | ||
| They need to reverse course and they need to stand up for Medicaid because when they stand up for Medicaid, they're standing up for the people of their states. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Oh, and I am now turning it over to the wonderful Senator from Georgia, Senator Warnock. | ||
| Thank you so very much, Senator Hassan. | ||
| Great to be here with all of my colleagues. | ||
| A budget is more than a fiscal document, it is also a moral document. | ||
| Show me your budget, and I'll show you who you think matters: who's in and who's out, who you think is expendable, where your priorities are. | ||
| And as we take stock of what the Washington Republicans are trying to do now, this budget, if it were an EKG, would suggest that Washington Republicans have a heart problem and that they are in need of moral surgery. | ||
| And so the consequences of the actions that they are trying to take in this moment hit into the lives of ordinary people. | ||
| I think too often those of us who work in this space and those who cover us sort of cover the politicians. | ||
| And when the politics becomes about the politicians, we lose sight of where and how this actually matters for ordinary people. | ||
| What they are trying to do is both immoral and impractical. | ||
| I have been working in this health care fight for years. | ||
| Long before I decided to run for the United States Senate. | ||
| I was fighting for health care in Georgia. | ||
| I remember when we passed the Affordable Care Act, how glad I was that that happened. | ||
| And I went into the Georgia Capitol and staged a sit-in in the governor's office because that governor and the next governor and the governor after that have all refused to expand Medicaid in Georgia. | ||
| It suggests that politicians have a heart problem. | ||
| Jesus said, where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. | ||
| Dr. King, who pasted the church where I now serve, said that of all the injustices, inequality in health care is the most shocking and the most inhumane. | ||
| They are busy trying to pass a tax cut for the wealthiest people in America, billionaires and millionaires, and they're doing it on the backs of ordinary people. | ||
| This cannot stand. | ||
| And so we will continue to hold them accountable. | ||
| And we encourage all of our constituents to hold them accountable. | ||
| And so, because I've been focused on this issue, glad now to serve on the finance committee under the great Ron White, and we'll be focused on these issues. | ||
| But I got arrested in Georgia trying to get health care for folks, staging a sit-in in the governor's office. | ||
| In fact, I got arrested in this Capitol in 2017 when they were trying to do the same thing, pass a $2 trillion tax cut at the expense of the poor and the farm bill, at the expense of the children's health care program. | ||
| But I decided to move from being an agitator to a legislator. | ||
| But we've got to keep on agitating, even if it's inside of these halls. | ||
| And so when I came to the Senate, I talked to all of my colleagues here in the Democratic caucus, and they agreed with me that we needed to provide Georgia and other non-expansion states some more incentives to expand. | ||
| And so remember, we got $14.2 billion for the non-expansion states to expand $2 billion just for Georgia alone. | ||
| And you know what Georgia did? | ||
| Georgia left that money on the table and left over 600,000 Georgians in the health care coverage gap. | ||
| Some got the message. | ||
| North Carolina took those incentives and they expanded Purple State. | ||
| Kentucky expanded. | ||
| And so now they're trying to go after these incentives. | ||
| They want to go after the tax credits that will allow people to get health care, and this has consequences on the lives of ordinary people. | ||
| We've seen a dozen hospitals in Georgia close over the last decade. | ||
| And those hospitals could be open with paying customers if they could get access to Medicaid. | ||
| When I think about this, I often think about Heather Payne, who is a traveling nurse from Dublin, Georgia. | ||
| Georgia has a health care program, if you want to call it that, that has not enrolled 10,000 people yet. | ||
| And Heather Payne is one of those people stuck in the gap. | ||
| As one of my colleagues pointed out, very often we talk about Medicaid expansion, we're talking about the working poor, people who work every single day. | ||
| Heather Payne is a traveling nurse who was taking care of patients even during COVID. | ||
| And then because she was a traveling nurse, some days she had health care, sometimes she didn't have health care. | ||
| She went poor enough to get conventional Medicaid, and the programs that she was eligible for would cost between $500 and $1,000 a month. | ||
| It was too much. | ||
| And so one day, she realized that something was happening in her body. | ||
| She knew something wasn't right. | ||
| But she didn't have enough money to see what it was. | ||
| And finally, she saved up enough money of her own cash to finally go and see a neurologist. | ||
| And the neurologist said, You've actually had a series of many strokes that require additional care. | ||
| And so here she is, she needs additional care, but she doesn't have health care. | ||
| And so she's literally caught up in the gap between the refusal of the state of Georgia to expand Medicaid and these onerous work requirements in states like Georgia. | ||
| She's sick, too sick to work, and she's being asked to prove that she can work or that she is working so that she can get health care. | ||
| Why to give Elon Musk and people like him a tax cut? | ||
| Let me put this in perspective in closing. | ||
| Nobody believes a Baptist preacher when he says in closing. | ||
| I was proud that we got $14 billion to help these states to expand Medicaid. | ||
| Elon Musk has got $18 billion in incentives from our federal government. | ||
| And he's the one who's telling us that the rest of us need to tighten our belts. | ||
| This is backwards. | ||
| It's not only immoral, it's impractical. | ||
| We're making the American workforce sicker and weaker, which I think ultimately is a national security issue. | ||
| And so we've got to straighten out this mess and center the people, people like Heather Payne, who's waiting right in this very moment to get the health care she deserves. | ||
| And now I'll turn it over to the chairman of the Finance Committee, my friend Senator Ron White. | ||
| Thank you, Senator Warnock. | ||
| It is a tough act to follow my friend from Georgia. | ||
| And let me thank Senator Baldwin. | ||
| She is the chair of our strike team, and she's basically got the NBA all-stars of the Finance Committee. | ||
| And I'm going to be really short. | ||
| The first point I'd make is that nobody should lose sight of what exactly happened this morning. | ||
| And that is, Donald Trump endorsed the House budget resolution today. | ||
| And this resolution mandates that $880 billion in cuts come from the House Energy and Commerce Committee. | ||
| Now, I was a member of that committee back in the day when I had a full head of hair and rugged good looks. | ||
| And I'll just tell you, there is no plausible way to hit that target without hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid and nursing home care and for kids and the like. | ||
| And those cuts mean that benefits are going to get cut. | ||
| Families are going to lose health insurance full stop. | ||
| Now, I was also on the Senate Finance Committee in 2017, the last time Donald Trump and Republicans came after Medicaid. | ||
| And if there is one thing that members of Congress are around since that day, remember, it's when you go after people's health care. | ||
| And in my state, one out of three have Medicaid as a lifeline. | ||
| You go after that, you have hell to pay. | ||
| And this last weekend, I had town hall meetings in a suburban part of the state, not the city, not the rural areas. | ||
| And the papers said thousands of Oregonians show up to make clear how they feel about matters like cuts in Medicaid. | ||
| And Elon Musk can rattle off a bunch of federal programs he wants to gut for sport on Twitter. | ||
| But what those thousands of people told me at a town hall meeting unlike any I ever had, and I've been doing this a while, they said these cuts that Musk has been pushing so hard are going to have real devastating consequences for families and communities. | ||
| And to these people whose lives are going to be worse off as a result of Medicaid cuts, it is going to be very cold comfort that their hardship allows some billionaire pal of Donald Trump to pick up another mansion or a yacht. | ||
| And the last point I want to make, because I think we want to have Senator Baldwin be our closer and kind of coordinate all the questions that I bet you guys have. | ||
| My closer is, my experience dealing with Medicaid over the years is there will be an effort by Republicans to keep the Medicaid cuts hidden behind the curtain. | ||
| They did that on the floor when we closed the debate about Robert Kennedy. | ||
| And the senior member, the chair, came and said, oh, we're really not doing anything. | ||
| And I basically got him and said, are you kidding me? | ||
| As we speak, they're working on their $880 billion worth of cuts. | ||
| So my colleagues today are making it clear that we're not backing down from the fight. | ||
| And I'm happy to be involved with them in it. | ||
| And Senator Baldwin's doing an excellent job being head of our task force on this. | ||
| And I look forward to working with her. | ||
| And in the parlance of the Senate, I yield the floor to our chair. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Well, any questions? | ||
| Yes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
As I'm speaking up and out about this issue, what power do Democrats really have to stop this from going into effect? | |
| Is it a filibuster? | ||
| How are you actually going to try to stop this? | ||
| Well, I think in addition to our own actions, we are alerting the American public. | ||
| It was the American public, our constituents, who voiced their concerns during the first Trump administration, which led to our being able to save the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare. | ||
| People understood that this was a critical threat to their health and well-being. | ||
| And so we're sounding the alarm. | ||
| Last night, the President said, I'm not touching Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, whatever, VA, I'm not touching them. | ||
| By this morning, he endorsed the House budget resolution, which paves the way for massive cuts to Medicaid. | ||
| And people have got to be aware. | ||
| We also have to explain what Medicaid does. | ||
| You know, the posters that are here talk about who is covered. | ||
| There's over 70 million Americans who get Medicaid, whether that is for seniors in long-term care, whether that is over 30 million children, Americans with disabilities. | ||
| And it also is the lifeblood for some of our critical access rural hospitals, community health clinics, et cetera. | ||
| Without Medicaid, many of those would disappear. | ||
| And so we've got to sound the alarm, inform, and organize. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What about legislatively? | |
| Is there anything you all can do? | ||
| Well, we will have two shots at this. | ||
| We have the budget resolution. | ||
| Now, remember, there's disagreement between the House and the Senate right now. | ||
| The President has just endorsed the House's one-budget approach. | ||
| And yet the Senate right now is taking a two-bill approach. | ||
| And we are poised to take action on that budget yet this week to be followed if it passes by budget reconciliation process. | ||
| We have amendments. | ||
| Those amendments, hopefully we can get some Republican votes on some of those. | ||
| But those amendments will be clearly designed to show the American public what is at risk right now. | ||
| Anyone else, please? | ||
| If I can just add to be clear here on this budget reconciliation process, the Republicans have complete control of this. | ||
| These are majority vote thresholds. | ||
| So this is up to the Republicans about whether they are going to go through with the President's commitment to cut taxes for multi-billionaires at the expense of the Medicaid program and other critical programs that the American people rely on. | ||
| This is what the Republicans are in control of, and it is on them if these Medicaid cuts go through. | ||
|
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Have you spoken to Republicans in the Senate that are against these kinds of Medicaid cuts? | |
| Well, look, the news of the last 24 hours is pretty new, but we intend to do that. | ||
| And, you know, this is an issue that affects, as I said in my remarks, blue states, purple states, and red states. | ||
| And in some cases, the more rural your state, the more severe the ramifications are for deep Medicaid cuts. | ||
| And so I do hope that not only will we be speaking with our Republican colleagues, but that their administrators of critical access hospitals, the chief medical officers of community health centers, will also be reaching out and sharing the ramifications of these cuts with them. | ||
| Yes. | ||
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unidentified
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The Attorney General of North Carolina, a Democrat, did just file a lawsuit back in January alleging Medicaid fraud from, I believe, as a health care company. | |
| I guess that kind of leads into my question of, is there any reform to Medicaid that's on the table at all for a percent of Democrats? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| We do not want to see fraud. | ||
| We do not want to see waste. | ||
| We want to see efficiency. | ||
| But let me be clear. | ||
| The massive cuts that we're talking about in the House budget resolution are far beyond what efforts to pair back against fraud and waste would achieve. | ||
| We are talking about massive cuts to the very children, people with disabilities, rural Americans, seniors, and that is what we need to talk about. | ||
| And you heard from my colleague, Catherine Cortez-Masto, who had in her very office the Medicaid fraud unit. | ||
| We are all for fighting fraud, just like the Attorney General of North Carolina. | ||
| But when we're talking about the cuts, the depth that they're contemplating, again, nearly a trillion dollars, their tax break for the billionaires is $4.6 trillion, unless the number has changed. | ||
| And so they're going to be digging deep. | ||
| They're going to ask the most vulnerable Americans to pay and sacrifice so that Elon Musk and Donald Trump and their like, their ilk, can get massive tax cuts. | ||
| And that should not stand. | ||
| We'll say fight fraud, not nursing home services that are a lifeline for the elderly. | ||
| And I'd also add, look, the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services has a long record of uncovering fraud, going after wrongdoers, holding them accountable, and getting the money back. | ||
| But the Trump administration, as you know, has fired almost all of the inspectors general, the very people who go after fraud, waste, and abuse in our government, and have a track record of getting results. | ||
| So again, they're speaking out of both sides of their mouth here. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks, Tammy. | |
| That was great. | ||
| All this week, watch C-SPAN's new Members of Congress series, where we speak with both Republicans and Democrats about their early lives, previous careers, families, and why they decided to run for office. | ||
| Tonight, at 9:30 p.m. Eastern, our interviews include Virginia Democratic Congressman Eugene Vindman, who was born in Ukraine, served as a U.S. Army officer, and played a role in the story of his brother, Alexander Vindman, who came to national attention in 2019 for his testimony before Congress on President Trump's relationship with Ukraine. | ||
| I was a lieutenant colonel assigned to the White House on a detail, deputy legal advisor on National Security Council staff, the chief ethics official on the National Security Council staff. | ||
| And so I worked right across the hall from my twin brother. | ||
| And he had the portfolio of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova. | ||
| He listened to the phone call. | ||
| He heard the president's attempt at extortion. | ||
| And he reported directly to me. | ||
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Watch new members of Congress all this week, starting at 9.30 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN. | |
| Saturdays, watch American History TV's 10-week series, First 100 Days. | ||
| We'll explore the early months of presidential administrations with historians, authors, and through the C-SPAN archives. | ||
| We learn about accomplishments and setbacks and how events impacted presidential terms and the nation up to the present day. | ||
| Saturday, the first 100 days of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. | ||
| At the height of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt defeated President Herbert Hoover in a landslide. | ||
| In his inaugural speech, he said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. | ||
| Early in his term, the president called for a special session of Congress to tackle the economic crisis. | ||
| Dozens of bills were passed to put people back to work and improve living conditions. | ||
| It was Franklin Roosevelt who later coined the phrase, First 100 Days. | ||
| Watch American History TV series, First 100 Days, Saturday at 7 p.m. Eastern on American History TV on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
| American democracy is bigger than any one person. | ||
| Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected. | ||
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We are still at our core a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
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Senate Republican Leader John Thune and his Democratic counterpart Chuck Schumer both had press conferences today. | |
| The majority leader talked about confirming 18 of President Donald Trump's cabinet-level nominees, which he said was the fastest rate since 2001. | ||
| Senator Thun also was asked about President Trump's rhetoric on Ukraine, which falsely blamed Ukraine for starting the war and calling President Vladimir Zelensky a dictator. | ||
| Democratic leader Schumer also discussed Republicans' budget plans, saying they would benefit billionaires and the ultra-wealthy. | ||
| Here's a look at those events. |