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Floor Speech
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Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, I want to speak briefly about two subjects. They are different. They are both important, but they are different.
Let me start with the reconciliation bill, which President Trump and others called the One Big Beautiful Bill. I continue to go through the bill, and every time I do, I am impressed.
This is a breathtaking bill in the sense that it covers so many subjects. I think each of us could spend hours talking about this bill. I will just hit the highlights. This is one of the most far-reaching pieces of legislation that this body will ever pass.
We extended the 2017 tax cuts--no small feat in itself. Had we not done that, the American people would have suffered under a $4.3 trillion tax increase. So we stopped that tax increase.
Some of my friends and colleagues talk about, well, all you did was stop the tax increase on billionaires.
That is nonsense. That is nonsense on a stick. Unless your soup of the day is gin, you know that that is a lie.
Half of that tax increase would have hit working men and working women and working families in this country. The other half would have hit our small businesses, and, yes, some of our large businesses. We stopped that.
We made some of those tax cuts permanent. We cut taxes on tips. In this bill, we cut taxes on overtime. We cut taxes on Social Security. We cut taxes on car loans. We expanded a tax credit for childcare to help moms and dads pay for the childcare so they can work. We increased the child tax credit. We increased the standard deduction, and that is going to take effect immediately.
We funded school choice. For years and years and years, I have tried--we all have tried, many of us have tried--to provide the American people--moms and dads--with school choice. This bill did it. I went to a public school. I am proud of that. But competition makes all of us better. I can go to my overpriced Capitol Hill apartment or Capitol Hill grocery store and choose from six or seven types of mayonnaise. Why shouldn't we give parents--moms and dads--choices for their kids' education? We are doing that with the school choice portion of this bill.
We increase money for the border, and we increase money for defense.
We also address the problem in Medicaid. And I have been very disappointed because some commentators have said that we are going to throw off from the Medicaid rolls, I have read, anywhere from 10 to 12 million people. The implication in some of these articles and some of these comments is that we are just going to look at the Medicaid rolls and go through and say: You are gone. We can't afford you.
That is not what this bill does. The first thing you have to realize is that, actually, Medicaid is not going to be cut at all under this bill. Under our bill that we just passed, our spending on Medicaid over the next 10 years is going to go up 20 percent, so nobody is cutting Medicaid.
There are some people, as a result of the new provisions that we have put into law, who will no longer be eligible for Medicaid and will no longer get Medicaid. But they weren't entitled to get it in the first place. So when you say: Well, you are throwing people off of Medicaid-- they weren't entitled to it in the first place. You are not entitled to Medicaid if you are making $200,000 a year and you didn't tell the truth when you signed up for Medicaid in your State and your State didn't verify your status.
But let me give you one example. CMS just put out a report. Our bill is going to change the law so that 2.8 million Americans--the CBO says, like, we are throwing 10 or 12 million Americans off of Medicaid. I will just give you this one example: 2.8 million of those Americans who will lose Medicaid are doubledippers. They signed up twice. We have 1.2 million people on the Medicaid rolls who are signed up in two States, and the American taxpayer is paying twice.
As you know, Mr. President, well--you were a great Governor; you were a Governor and a damn good one--most States use managed care, and they pay per Medicaid person. So if a State is paying, let's say--I will pick a number--$8,000 per Medicaid patient per year to the healthcare organization to provide their care, and that person is signed up in two States, they are doubledipping, and it is costing the American taxpayer two $8,000 payments a year. That is cheating. So from one perspective, you are throwing these people off of Medicaid--they weren't entitled to doubledip in the first place.
CMS also came out with a report. By ``CMS,'' I mean the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is the Federal Agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid. CMS has also found that there are 1.6 million people who are on Medicaid today who are receiving both Medicaid and ObamaCare.
Well, what is ObamaCare? I will refresh everyone's memory.
Medicaid is supposed to be for the poor and disabled, and Medicare is for the elderly, and a lot of other Americans have health insurance through their job. But there are a certain number of Americans who don't have health insurance because they are not old enough for Medicare, they are not poor enough for Medicaid, and maybe their employer doesn't offer health insurance. So they can go to an exchange--we call them the ObamaCare exchange--and buy health insurance.
Now, President Obama and some of my colleagues--I wasn't here then, but when we passed the ObamaCare, the ObamaCare exchanges, the Affordable Care Act, we were told that health insurance would be cheaper, and we were told it would be more accessible. It has been neither. We were also told if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. That wasn't true either.
But the point is that we have a number of Americans who, if they don't qualify for Medicare, they don't qualify for Medicaid, they don't get insurance through their employer, they go to the ObamaCare exchanges. CMS found we have got 1.6 million people who are getting both health insurance through the ObamaCare exchanges--which we subsidize, taxpayers do--and through Medicaid. That is called doubledipping. It is illegal.
CBO can put out all the reports that they want to saying: Oh, you are throwing all these people off Medicaid. And technically, they are right, but they are not eligible to be on Medicaid. I just gave you an example, 2.8 million people who are doubledipping. It is illegal to doubledip. It is immoral to doubledip. It is unfair to taxpayers to doubledip. All our bill does is say you can't doubledip. Cheating is wrong.
Is that throwing people off of Medicaid? Technically, yes. But, once again, as the other provisions in this bill also do, we are taking people off Medicaid who weren't eligible for it in the first place.
As a result of these 2.8 million people, I think CMS--I am looking for their figure. I think it cost the American taxpayer, because of these 2.8 million folks who are doubledipping, $14 billion a year--$14 billion a year over a 10-year window, which is the horizon that we use. That is $140 billion that we are going to save, and that savings is going to go back into Medicaid to make it even stronger.
That is just one example of how much of--not much, but--well, yes, much of the reporting on our bill is misleading.
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