H. Con. Res. 14

Floor Speech

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Mr. REED. Mr. President, well, we are back here again with another variation of the Trump plan and the Republican plan to do further damage to our economy and to the working men and women of this country. It has been sliced and diced and repackaged and unpackaged, but it still boils down to a very simple equation: big tax cuts for the very, very wealthy and cuts to Medicaid and other key programs that are essential to Americans.

This resolution is going to cost a lot of money--about $5.8 trillion with a ``t.''

Yesterday, President Trump unveiled his tariff policies and today, the markets reacted. They lost $2.5 trillion of value. He is just taking a sledgehammer to our economy and a sledgehammer to the working families who depend upon these programs like Medicaid and a sledgehammer to our universities and medical schools and research laboratories, which have made us the premier center for research innovation and healthcare in the world. And with these sledgehammer blows, I don't think we can maintain that status.

These proposals by the President and my Republican colleagues are designed to take away the healthcare coverage from millions of Americans--seniors, kids, veterans, individuals with disabilities--and they particularly seem to focus on Medicaid.

Medicaid provides essential healthcare services for the most vulnerable populations in the country. It covers nearly 80 million people, if you combine those covered by the Children's Health Insurance Plan, CHIP.

In my home State of Rhode Island, over 300,000 people--and that is about one-third of my State--depend on Medicaid. And the Republicans are talking about cutting this program by at least $880 billion, which would be devastating. Looking at the Medicaid recipients in Rhode Island. It is interesting. One in five adults ages 19 to 64 are covered; one in three children are covered. And we all know how critical healthcare is for children because a childhood problem left untreated can lead, often, to much more serious health consequences as they grow older--much more dependency on social programs, which are paid for by us. Good healthcare as a child guarantees, in many, many, and most cases, success in school, success in life, and a healthy life--one in three children in Rhode Island need Medicaid.

Five in eight people residing in nursing homes in my home state are also receiving Medicaid. Let me tell you what is going to happen when Medicaid is cut by this extraordinary amount of money, $880 billion. A lot of nursing homes will close because their margin, the difference between opening the doors and closing them, is the Medicaid money they receive. When that goes, where are you going to put your ailing mother or grandmother?

I will tell you what you do. You are going to do it like they did it before Medicaid. When I was a young kid, it was not unusual to go visit someone, and in the front room there would be the hospital bed, the grandmother, and the mother was taking care of the person and that was healthcare back then. But after Medicaid, we were able to create a much more effective healthcare system.

And this will touch not just the very poor; this touched working families. It is the only way they can keep, really, their mother or father or older relative or a child with a very serious illness in a safe, protected place where they can receive appropriate care.

Three in seven Medicaid recipients in Rhode Island are working-age adults with disabilities. This is a situation where these people, because of their physical limitations, cannot work and need assistance. Some are severely disabled, others are significantly disabled, and they are going to be left, literally, out in the cold.

I must say there is a corollary here because just a few days ago, the President announced that he was going to take the IDEA education program and move it into the Department of Health, which at the same time is trying to shed thousands and thousands of workers. So my fear, of course, is that--again, going back into my youth, the fifties and the sixties--that children with disabilities will be sitting in the back of the room by themselves trying to keep themselves occupied because what we have created through IDEA--a system of education tailored to the individual child's disability--will be unsupportable.

And that is the kind of damage he is doing. It is the working people. It is the families. It is the kids. It is, I think, inexcusable. Throughout the country, 38 million children rely on Medicaid. And 2.3 million children with disabilities, as I said, throughout the country, rely on Medicaid. And also, as I have said, throughout the country, not just Rhode Island, 7 million seniors count on Medicaid to afford nursing home care or other health care services.

So we are in a situation now where we are basically undercutting our healthcare system, and it is not just these people who feel it. Everyone will feel it. If these Medicaid cuts go through, it will create so much turmoil in my State that our healthcare delivery system will be under great pressure--but, I think, so much pressure that it will not work.

Where do people go when they don't have healthcare? They go to the emergency room. So if you or I or somebody who might even have healthcare insurance and we have a serious problem, well, we can go to the emergency room and just get in the back of the line that is going all the way around the block and through the parking lot and everyplace else because these hundreds of thousands of people without healthcare, that is where they will have to go when it is so painful they can't go to work.

This is a disaster in the making. And, again, we saw last week and weeks before, President Trump talking about, ``I am going to put tariffs in and we are going to fix the whole economy.'' Nonsense. It is a disaster. It is killing our markets.

And, once again, ``Oh, I am going to go in there and take out Medicaid,'' et cetera, et cetera. It will be a disaster. I think we must avoid it.

We are better off because of Medicaid--better healthcare outcomes in this country. It is a different country, literally, than it was prior to the introduction of Medicaid, and we are better for it. It provides healthcare coverage, for example, for 17 million women of reproductive age so they can have the healthcare they need. And it helps families grow and prosper. And by making seniors and people with disabilities get the care they need, we are, I think, living up to the aspirations of this country, which is to ensure that those who need care get care.

You know, there have been a lot of men and women who served in the Armed Forces of the United States. I was proud to do it myself. And they weren't risking their lives so that a very wealthy individual could have five Mercedes rather than four. They were risking it so kids could have healthcare who needed it, so that their mother and father could have a place to be when they were sick and ill in their older years. And what we are doing? We are forgetting that sacrifice. We are saying: No, we are just here to pay off the rich people, the rich people who paid so much through the President's campaign to get him elected.

The one thing I want to emphasize, which is very important and often overlooked--going back to Rhode Island--74 percent of adults on Medicaid are working in my state. There is this insidious notion that this is just a free giveaway to people who don't work, who don't deserve it, et cetera. That is why we can get rid of it.

Seventy-four percent of the adults in Rhode Island on Medicaid are working, and they are working very hard. By the way, my guess is they are not getting a big benefit from these tax cuts because they are minimum wage or a little bit more.

So we are really doing something that is so unjust and, I believe, un-American in rewarding the wealthy--some of whom have worked hard to get it, some of whom just were lucky enough to be born to the right parents. And we are giving them a fortune, and we are taking away basic healthcare from working men and women.

We are in a very, very difficult situation. I don't think we can touch Medicaid, for the moral reasons I tried to suggest and for the economic reasons.

If those 74 percent of Medicaid adults in Rhode Island who are working can't get to work because they are ill, how do we get the jobs done? We don't.

The impact on the Nation in terms of these cuts is going to be horrendous, and this impact is going to be everyplace in the country. I have talked a lot about Rhode Island, but one of the ideas the Republicans are advancing to cut Medicaid is to eliminate the Medicaid expansion provided for under the Affordable Care Act.

Now, according to the Urban Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, this cut would cost 41 States over $44 billion. States would have to increase their share of Medicaid spending by 25 percent. States like North Dakota, Indiana, Montana, and Nebraska would see their costs go up by more than 30 percent.

So I hope my colleagues from these States are ready, willing, and able to go out and tell their constituents: Your healthcare costs are going up 30 percent.

Now, obviously, I oppose this resolution that is being proposed. We have to do more, not less. And it is not just about the moral commitment I feel we have to people who need healthcare coverage; it is about the economics of caring for people early before it becomes more expensive, providing facilities for people who need those facilities rather than letting them languish at home.

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