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Floor Speech

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Mr. HICKENLOOPER. Mr. President, the United States is the wealthiest country on Earth. I think it is fair to say it is the wealthiest country in the history of the world, probably in the history of the solar system. What we do with that wealth speaks volumes about who we are as a country, about the responsibility we feel to our fellow Americans; it define us.

Earlier this month, Republicans passed, I would call it a truly devastating budget bill that gives many of the wealthiest people in this country and many who don't want a tax break--it gives many of the wealthiest people in this country and corporations a $4.5 trillion tax break. That was their goal. They just needed to find a way to pay for it. Well, actually, they only paid for a small part of it. But in doing so, they cut more than a trillion dollars from Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and food stamps--the programs that help struggling Americans meet their most basic human need for food and healthcare--again, just so they could pass the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the history of our country.

That speaks volumes about whom this administration values, but what does the bill mean for Americans? Over time, 15 million Americans are likely to lose their health coverage, and 241,000 of them live in Colorado. Hundreds and hundreds of hospitals around the country are at risk of closure, many of them in Colorado.

Take the Sunrise Monfort Community Health Clinic in Evans, CO. We were there in May, and Sunrise's network of 14 rural health clinics serves 43,000 patients across a broad swath of Northern Colorado. Seventy percent of them are enrolled in either Medicaid or Medicare. Now, we spoke with their CEO back in May, and we were told point-blank that gutting Medicaid--dramatically making cuts to Medicaid--will force them to dramatically cut services.

They estimate that those cuts in Medicaid will force between 7,000 and 14,000 of their patients off of healthcare. That is a quarter of their patients. Again, all because lawmakers in Washington have decided to give still bigger tax cuts to the ultrawealthy and, again, many of whom don't want or need tax cuts. It is nuts.

The administration knew taking healthcare away from many Americans would be unpopular. So they crafted and snuck in a provision to solve that. Most of the Medicaid cuts won't take place until 2027. ``Well, why wait till 2027?'' you might ask. Well, because it is after the midterm elections at the end of 2026.

They basically gutted our social safety net system and then made sure that Republicans wouldn't be--well, they found a way to make sure that Republicans would be insulated from the immediate political costs from their voters. That is why, right now, they are building a massive public relations campaign to go out and sell the bill to Americans.

They, so far, completely deny that this bill is going to harm Americans in any way. Instead they say it is about efficiency, government efficiency, and cutting out waste, fraud, and abuse.

Well, listen, I am all for making government more efficient. When I was mayor of Denver, we made the city smaller. We had a hiring freeze for 2\1/2\ years. We asked the workers to do more with less, and they did that. But we did it in increments, and we worked to make sure people knew how much they were valued and they could make a difference.

When I was Governor of Colorado, we balanced our budget every single year. We went through every board and regulation that we could find on the books, 24,500 rules and regulations, and we simplified or eliminated 11,000. We did all this without cutting services and without cutting resources that people rely on.

Now, Republicans knew they were going way beyond waste, fraud, and abuse. That is part of the reason it took 24 hours of voting and arm- twisting to pass this, what we call in my family, ``God Awful Bill.''

They knew they were going to be hurting their constituents and Americans. I mean, the bill itself is a prime example of a--what my grandfather used to call a drunken spending spree. It is going to cost the American people more than $4 trillion when you consider the interest payments on the national debt.

And none of the arguments the Republicans have used have legs. Ultimately, the bill isn't just a trillion dollars in cuts for Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. It really, through these rules and paperwork, creates new barriers to access. That means more paperwork, more hoops for families to jump through.

Under Trump's ``Big Ugly Bill,'' government efficiency just means rolling out the redtape, miles and miles of it. And who pays the price? Well, rural Coloradans are going to pay some price. People living in Cortez and Lamar or Rifle will pay a price when their closest healthcare center closes. Pregnant women who have to drive 50 miles to give birth after their closest hospital will be forced to close their birthing centers and kids who lose their healthcare because their parents had to navigate so much redtape to prove they do, in fact, meet the requirements will pay the cost and adult children who can't provide sufficient proof that their full-time job is taking care of a disabled parent.

Now, listen to this, if you are a single adult in Colorado, you don't even qualify for Medicaid if you earn less than $1,735 a month. That means making less than $10.01. If you make $10.02 an hour, you already don't qualify for Medicaid.

So people making less than $10 an hour have to fill out reams of paperwork to demonstrate that they qualify. It is not just, they should be able to show their W-2 and say, hey, I am making $9.50 and that should be enough, but somehow there is a worry that people making less than $10 an hour should fill out all this other paperwork.

In what kind of a bizarre world do we live in? Bottom line, Republicans are cutting costs by punishing the poorest and most needy in our country when they can't keep up.

They are making the people who suffer the most suffer more. That is not the America that I believe in. The Medicaid system is not perfect, but it exists in our country because that country, our country, decided that no matter where you live or how little money you make, working Americans deserve basic healthcare. Who knows, someday we might get everyone covered. It is a vow we need to make. And certainly when we created Medicaid, it was a vow we made to help take care of the neediest people--or many of the neediest people in our country.

Now, because our country is measured by how we treat people--let me put this a better way. Because our country is measured by not how we treat people at the top but how we treat large numbers of Americans who start at the bottom, striving for a better life, that is how our country should be, and that is the dream we are all chasing.

And, ultimately, it is the American people that are going to have the final word.

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