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Floor Speech

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Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I want to join my colleagues in talking about one of the terrible elements of this bill, and that is it is going to take away Medicaid coverage, healthcare for--this morning, it was 13.7 million people across this country, including Vermont and including Missouri. But we just got an update: It is 16 million people; 16 million people are going to lose healthcare.

And this Medicaid Program that provides access to low-income folks, to kids with disabilities, and, of course, those parents who do so much to care for their child with special needs--they need that Medicaid to be able to keep body and soul together and give that child that they love the best they can possibly have.

It provides healthcare for two out of three seniors who are in nursing homes. Medicaid pays for those hospital beds.

So how is it that at a time when healthcare is expensive--it is getting out of reach for more and more people; it is the biggest expense many families face--that we are actually considering in the U.S. Senate a bill that would take away healthcare from 16 million people? It is hard to believe that the U.S. Senate has any degree of appreciation for the reality of the everyday lives of folks who depend on this healthcare.

The legislation also takes away subsidies that have made it affordable for people to buy into the Affordable Care Act, known as ObamaCare. It is the margin that is necessary for millions of people to be able to continue to get healthcare coverage through the Affordable Care Act.

So we literally have a piece of legislation that is going to take away this healthcare for individuals. It is going to take away healthcare from families who are getting access through the Affordable Care Act.

This bill also is cutting nutrition programs. The SNAP benefits really matter for lower income families. It is how they feed their kids. And in your community and in mine, we have thousands of volunteers who put together food shelves, community food programs; they do Meals on Wheels; they volunteer to do everything they possibly can to help our kids in school with nutrition, to help with the Meals on Wheels for our seniors and then, of course, to distribute and help with the SNAP program. Millions of Americans are going to lose that. And, by the way, that SNAP benefit amounts to about 6 bucks a day, maybe a little more. Hardly a big bonanza but an incredibly important component of keeping body and soul together. It is the meals that are so essential to the well-being not just of our seniors but to our children.

So all of this is being done as a way of ``paying for'' legislation that is going to lower taxes. And I don't know how it works for you in Missouri, but when I am talking to Vermonters, nobody has come up to me and said: Peter, you have got to get to work on getting me that tax cut.

Nobody believes that there is a tax cut in this bill that is going to be anything at all meaningful to them in their struggles with affording paying their bills at the end of each month.

Now, if you are in the uberwealthy class, you would get $250,000. That is real money, although for some of those folks who are making millions of dollars a year, it won't even be anything they notice.

But why is it that we are pushing through this legislation that will provide a tax cut to folks who, by and large, don't need it, will do very little for working-class people, will have a negative impact on their ability to pay their bills, especially the ones who are going to lose access to Medicaid, especially folks who are going to lose access to food stamps or the SNAP benefits that are so essential to their well-being? And that is on top of all of those folks having to pay more because of the tariffs.

So this is an assault on the budgets of working families in America. That is what it really is. It is going to shrink their take-home pay at the end of the month. That is literally what it is we are doing. And for what? To provide a tax cut that is not going to be meaningful for the vast majority of Americans who really will end up paying more through tariffs and lost access to healthcare and nutrition programs than they will ever even in the wildest stretch of the imagination get from the so-called tax cut bill, the Big Beautiful Bill.

But there is another part of this that is so damaging, and especially for those of us representing rural America. Individuals need healthcare, but they can't get healthcare unless they can go to a community hospital, unless they can go to a community health center, unless they can go to a private practitioner who accepts Medicaid reimbursement.

All of those people who lose access to Medicaid to pay those bills are going to continue to show up at the doctor's office. They are going to show up at the emergency room. They are going to go to our community hospitals. They are going to go to our community health centers. And those health centers and those doctors will continue to do everything that they can to provide care, even if they don't get paid.

But at a certain point, they can't continue. They can't keep the doors open, they can't pay salaries to staff. They can't pay the light bill.

So what this does is not only take away access to healthcare for individuals, it starts to unravel the healthcare system to deliver healthcare to people in the community. Those institutions that lose the modest revenue reimbursement that you get from Medicaid--far less than Medicare, far less than private pay--are going to lose that revenue. And those institutions, those hospitals, those practices already operating on a very thin margin are going to go out of business.

And then what happens? We put all of the pressure for paying for the healthcare system on the private sector. And what we have seen over and over again is the so-called cost shift. It is a real thing. It is not a so-called cost shift; it is real. So the more money you take out of Medicaid, the more money and more burden you put on the private insurance market.

And who pays that? A lot of our employers. You know, in Vermont--I am sure this is true in Missouri--our employers care about their employees, and there is a struggle every year for employers who want to provide employer-sponsored healthcare when they get the sticker shock of a 10-, 15-, or a 25-percent increase in premiums. And that always then forces the discussion about ``Do we want to give a raise?'' or ``Do we want to just maintain benefits but pay for the higher premium with what would have been your raise?'' So that is further pressure.

So this bill does real harm to individuals, but it really also starts to continue and accelerate the unraveling of a financially insecure medical payment system.

So why do we do this? It is hard to answer. You know, it is a theoretical benefit. The theory here is if you lower taxes, you will boost the economy. We have been hearing that since Reagan, and that is very much in dispute, especially when the lower taxes go to folks who don't need it, and the folks who are struggling to pay their bills aren't getting much relief and are getting higher costs from tariffs and getting higher costs because they are losing access to healthcare, and this is going to weaken our communities.

And then of course, finally, what we are going to see is a significant increase in our debt. And the recent CBO scores, I think, put it at $2.8 trillion. And what are we getting for that? You know, sometimes a country has to borrow like we did in World War II. Sometimes you have to borrow like we did during COVID. Sometimes you have to borrow to rescue the economy like we did after the 2008 Wall Street crash. And you know why you are doing it.

But when you are in better times where you don't have this market collapse, you don't have this mass pandemic, that is not the time to be adding to the debt. And what it does is it means that in the future, if we do have to borrow for an emergency, our capacity to do it is more limited.

And what it is also doing right now is raising interest rates. And as interest rates go up, the cost of debt service on our budget goes up. And right now--right now--the biggest expenditure of taxpayer money is to pay interest on the debt that is escalating exponentially. So we are spending more on debt service than we do on the military. We are spending more on debt service than we do on Medicare and way more than we are on Medicaid. And by adding to the debt, it is clearly putting pressure on interest rates, raising what it is taxpayers have to pay.

So there is nothing good in this bill for the working person or for their small businesses that when they need to borrow money, they are much better off if they can get a lower rate of interest or when a family has to get a car loan, they can get a lower rate of interest or a mortgage, they can get a lower rate of interest. It is the exact opposite.

So we have got families who are paying more because of tariffs, losing a lot because they are losing their Medicaid eligibility and losing their access to the Affordable Care Act, and then everybody is paying more because of the high interest associated with the escalation in the debt.

We should kill this bill, and I would urge all of my colleagues to take into consideration how this is going to affect the people whom each of us represents.

You know, there is a bipartisan element to this bill. The bipartisan aspect of this bill is that everybody is going to share the pain of what this bill does. It is folks in red States. It is the folks in the blue States. Whether they voted for Harris or they voted for Trump, if they lose their Medicaid, that hurts; if they lose their community hospital, that hurts; if they pay higher interest rates, that hurts.

Let's come to our senses and vote against this bill.

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