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Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, today is kind of an exceptional day. It is the 60th anniversary of the Medicare and Medicaid Act, which created two of the most successful programs for families really that the world has ever seen.
It should be a moment for celebration. Unfortunately, a bad turn has been taken, and there are now attacks on Medicaid and Medicare happening right in this building.
The ``Beautiful for Billionaires Bill'' that the Republicans forced through on a purely partisan basis cuts Medicaid explicitly--$1 trillion cut to Medicaid. So folks who are on Medicaid are going to see a real danger in their lives as a result of those cuts.
You may say: Well, I am not on Medicaid. I have private insurance. I have Medicare. I am going to be fine.
Not so. When the cuts are that big, they knock essential revenue away from hospitals, away from your family doctor, away from health centers, away from nursing homes. And I don't know about all the other States, but in Rhode Island, all those institutions are struggling. These are not easy times for people who are providing healthcare in our healthcare system. When you knock $1 trillion out of their pockets-- because that is where this goes. Medicaid money doesn't go to individuals, into their pockets, it goes to their providers. If you take away that revenue from the providers, you put them at risk.
You don't have to be on Medicaid to be harmed if your nursing home closes down because it has gone broke because Medicaid funding is no longer available.
So the Medicaid cuts are right in our face, and the damage they are going to do to healthcare institutions is obvious.
What is a little bit trickier and what I am calling out here on the floor today is the sneak attack on Medicare. I could run a tape here of all the Republicans who said: Oh, we are not going to cut Medicare. Oh, Medicare is different. Oh, we are going to protect Medicare.
We heard the President say it.
It was all hogwash. It was all complete hogwash. The sneak attack is underway, and I am going to tell you how it works. It works because the ``Beautiful for Billionaires Bill'' added $3.4 trillion or more to the debt. The Republicans had to lift the debt limit by $5 trillion, so it is a big number added to the debt. When that much added debt gets dumped onto our fiscal picture, it triggers another law. It triggers a law called the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act. Our technical term for it around here is that it triggers ``sequestration.''
When you create that much added debt, when you run up deficits that badly--as the Republicans have done to fund their billionaire tax cuts--here is what happens to Medicare. This is from the Congressional Budget Office. It triggers a $45 billion cut to Medicare in 2026, and it will increase each year to about $75 billion as an annual cut to Medicare in 2034. Between 2026, next year, and 2034, this trigger will produce $535 billion in cuts to Medicare.
They don't want you to know that. They don't want to tell you that. They would like it to just happen automatically so they don't have fingerprints on it, but their fingerprints are all over it.
So what we should be doing is passing my bill to put Medicare and Social Security on permanently sound footing as far as the actuarial eye can see by simply lifting the cap on how much of your income is subject to Social Security and Medicare contributions. Easy to do. Very simple. Very fair. It makes Social Security and Medicare solvent essentially indefinitely if my bill passes.
That is what I would like to be talking about. Instead, we have a direct attack on Medicaid; a rebound attack from those cuts on the major institutions of our American healthcare system, like our family doctors and our doctors and our nursing homes; and a sneak attack--a sneak attack--through the pay-as-you-go provisions on Medicare to the tune of over half a trillion dollars.
Mr. President, this is not a good day. I regret that we are at this sorry pass.
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