One Big Beautiful Bill Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHATZ. Madam President, 2 weeks ago, Republicans passed one of the most unpopular bills in the history of the country--one of the most unpopular bills in the history of the country. Now that it is law, we don't have to imagine anymore what might happen; we know for sure what is going to happen to tens of millions of people all across the country.

I want to focus on five things that are going to happen--five things that are going to happen because we no longer have to talk about a House version or a Senate version or what the President says he wants or if someone says ``If I don't get this, I am going to vote no''; now we have a law. We have public law, Federal law.

The first thing that is going to happen is 17 million Americans, including 9 million people on Medicaid, will lose healthcare coverage in about 18 months' time. To keep their coverage, people will have to complete hours and hours of paperwork just to prove they are working. That is in spite of the fact that the number of nondisabled adults on Medicaid who don't work is very low--about 8 percent.

How do these work requirements actually function? Well, in Arkansas, which is one of the two States that tried this and then pulled it back because it was a failure, the reporting portal was only open during the day and closed between the hours of 9 p.m. and 7 a.m.

Let's say you work long hours as a truckdriver. If you are trying to log on at night to fill out your forms, you are out of luck. Let's say something unfortunate happens to you. Let's say you get in a car accident or have a bad case of the flu. Maybe you are not hospitalized, but you are incapacitated, at least temporarily. If you missed the reporting window, you might lose the coverage.

What is preposterous about these Medicaid work requirements is that in order to establish that you are either working or seeking work, you have to fill out a form. If you get sick and are bedridden and can't fill out the form, they say: Don't worry, there is an exception for a situation like that.

Guess how you apply for the exception. By filling out another form.

There are only a couple million people on Medicaid who even fit the description of someone who is nondisabled and on Medicaid. Yet the actual official projections, which is to say the way they save the money, is they are projecting that many, many millions of people are going to get kicked off of Medicaid even though they are eligible.

I know I am a Democrat, and I wanted this bill to fail, and I want to tell you why this is a failure of a bill, but that is literally in their projections. Without those projections, they don't have enough revenue for the biggest tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the history of the planet.

No. 2, hundreds of rural hospitals and nursing homes will close without enough funding to continue operating. More people are going to get sick because of this law, but we are going to have fewer hospitals and doctors to take care of them. Why? Because Medicaid is a big revenue stream for really all hospitals but especially rural hospitals. It can be up to about half of the payer mix.

What is a payer mix? It just means you might get paid by private insurance 30 percent, you might get paid by Medicaid 45 percent, you might have a little VA, and you might have a little private pay; it adds up to 100 percent. As you look at your revenue picture, 40, 50-- sometimes even more--percent of that money comes from Medicaid. If there is a huge $1 trillion nationwide reduction in Medicaid money, that money is reduced money for rural hospitals, and rural hospitals will definitely close--not all of them but many of them.

So even if you are not on Medicaid, if you live in a place where there is a rural hospital and that is the flagship hospital for a small town, that might not be available to you. You might have to drive 2 or 3 hours for care, even emergency care.

No. 3, starting next year, tens of millions of people are going to pay hundreds of dollars a month more for health insurance.

This is what, I think, we should linger on because now that the fight over ObamaCare is sort of in the rearview mirror, people just think they get onto the ACA portal; they sign up for their healthcare; and they pay what they pay, right? Like, Oh, I am on a family plan. I want ``this'' level of deductible. Then it spits out how much you are going to pay every month. What tens of millions of people don't actually know is that those rates on the exchange are subsidized, and without those subsidies, we are going to go back to the bad old days of pre- ObamaCare, when people would pay absurd amounts of money for their healthcare insurance even if they are employed, even if they do have insurance.

What is, I think, underrated, both politically and on policy, is all of those rates get set in the next couple of months because, in order to start paying and in order to start enrolling, you have got to notify people: Hey, your thing that was $289 a month now is $789 a month. So sometime in the fall--it depends on the State, in October, November, and some people in December--people are going to get a letter, saying: If you want to stay on the same healthcare plan, here is your new price. And those new prices are going to be astronomical.

Now, we do have a disagreement between the parties. I think there are a lot of people who just don't like the public subsidy of healthcare insurance premiums. I am sure the Presiding Officer has her reservations about that kind of thing. It is about the size and the scope of government, but there is a factual aspect to this which is, whatever one's governing philosophy is and whatever one thought about the Affordable Care Act, the plain fact of the matter is, people are going to get letters from their insurance carriers with astronomical increases that they will not be able to pay.

No. 4, 5 million people are either going to lose some or all of their nutritional assistance starting next year.

You know, this trope is almost as old as I am--like some lazy person on food stamps just collecting food stamps, loving that life, going to the store, buying fancy stuff. It is $6 a day. The average nutritional assistance amount per person per day is 6 bucks. I don't know if you know this, but we have subsidized food in the U.S. Senate, not because the government is paying for it but because all of the restaurants that operate here don't have to pay lease rent so it is a little bit cheaper than you would normally get. I can't get anything for 6 bucks downstairs in the Dirksen cafeteria, not that would feed me.

Six dollars a day is the average amount, and what the Republicans decided to do to generate savings, to find savings, is to cut nutritional assistance. Why? Because they needed to pay for the biggest tax cut in American history for the wealthiest people and corporations that has ever existed. It would be one thing if people were getting 75 bucks a day for food. It would be one thing if they were getting 25 bucks a day for food, but they are getting 6 bucks, and 5 million people will now have an enormously difficult time trying to figure out just how to survive the day--and I mean that quite literally, survive the day--to find the calories within their $6 or $8 or $12 budget.

Finally, people are going to pay hundreds of dollars more per year in electricity because this bill throttles the cheapest and most abundant form of energy in wind and solar. And this is where you have got to stay with me for a moment.

I am very passionate about climate action. I think it is a planetary emergency. I think it is a moral obligation that we take care of our planet so it can sustain us for generations to come. But even if you don't care about that, the only energy that is ready to come online right now is solar energy--some wind energy but mostly solar energy. Why? Because nuclear, frankly, takes at least 10 years to permit and site, and, of course, anytime anyone wants to do any nuclear power generation, everybody in whatever neighborhood or State or county that is in tries to stop it. You don't just have regulatory risk; you have project risk, so 10 years is an optimistic scenario. I am a big believer in nuclear energy, but 10 years is the most realistic scenario to get a bunch of nuclear energy online. Likewise, geothermal is, maybe, 5 to 8 years in the most optimistic scenario. Again, I love geothermal energy. I think it is an untapped resource across the United States of America.

We have about a 6-year gap before any of those other technologies are ready. So a lot of fossil advocates go: Well, why don't we do more gas? There is a backlog of combined-cycle gas turbines, and that can't just be fixed by saying: ``I will take more.'' Everybody wants more. There is a backlog. You cannot get gas generation online in the next 5 years. So what does that mean? It means, over the next 5 years, solar is the stuff that is instantly pluggable into the grid, supercheap, not terribly controversial except for in this Chamber, and ready to power the AI revolution and whatever other load needs we have.

But this bill kind of punitively, kind of ideologically decides: No, we are not for ``all of the above''; you know that thing we said about whatever is cheap and plentiful and available every time we were trying to prevent clean energy from coming on the grid? Do you remember that thing we used to say? Now, really, what we meant is, we quite hate solar energy, particularly. We hate solar energy. Again, I think that is preposterous from a planetary standpoint, but even if there were no planetary crisis, this is the energy that is available to us, and we are about to face energy shortages.

The reason, for instance, Texas, of all places, has not had blackouts and brownouts is because solar can absorb wind; the Sun is high. It is 108 degrees, and everybody is pumping their air-conditioners. That also happens to be the point in time and the point of the day when all of the solar farms are running at full capacity, and they can power the grid.

So solar energy isn't something from 17 years ago when you said, you know, sometimes the Sun is shining and sometimes it is not and it is intermittent and the batteries aren't there. All of that is in the rearview mirror. All of the technical issues--not all of them. Ninety percent of the technical issues related to solar energy have been resolved.

That is the scariest thing for the fossil energy people. Do you know why? Because they can't argue that this isn't economically smarter; they just have to argue that it is woke or something, like woke electrons. Who cares where the electrons come from? If they are cheap and plentiful, we should all be for them.

So this bill is going to create shortages which will drive up the prices and, in some places, reduce power quality. What does ``power quality'' mean? It means we are going to have blackouts and brownouts across the country.

To do any of these things in the bill would be bad, but to do all of it--all of it--in order to pay for the biggest wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in history is morally and economically bankrupt. Nobody asked for any of this. Trump voters were not demanding any of this. Nobody was asking to lose their healthcare or not be able to feed their kids or to pay more to keep the lights on at home, but they raced to do it anyway, knowing full well how devastating it would be for the country and for their own home States.

One final point: We are not going to stop talking about this. We are going to talk about this until it is repealed. We are going to talk about this when the rates go up for your electricity. We are going to talk about this when kids are thrown off their nutritional assistance. We are going to talk about this when rural hospitals close. We are going to talk about this when your insurance coverage rates go up.

We are not going to stop talking about this because this document which was enacted into law is a perfect encapsulation of the difference between the political parties. My party is flawed--obviously, my party is flawed--but I have never seen my party propose a bill that transferred so much money from the poor to the rich, and I have never seen my party propose a bill that raises the price of electricity, that raises the price of food, and that raises the price of healthcare. So we are going to talk about this today, tomorrow, and for the next 18 months until this thing is repealed from the Federal lawbooks.

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