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Floor Speech
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Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I appreciate the opportunity to speak today.
Some may know and some may not that today is Medicaid's birthday, and I thought it was probably a good time to--or anniversary or whatever you want to call it. But I came down here to reconnect to a discussion that I was having with my colleagues and with the White House on some of the concerns I have with the provisions in the bill that we packaged that was called the Big Beautiful Bill. That is actually not a marketing term. It is literally what the name of the bill is.
First, I have to stipulate that there are aspects of this bill that I would love to vote on 10 times--for example, the tax reform. The tax portions of this bill were something I worked very hard, as a member of the Finance Committee, to get passed back in 2017. What we did there was to avoid the single largest tax increase in U.S. history. For those who say it was tax breaks to billionaires and corporations, you probably ought to read the language or have somebody who has read it explain it better. The tax reform measures help people who grew up like I did, first and foremost. Go to that trailer park that I lived at on Richards Road in Antioch, TN, which is just south of downtown Nashville, or go to the one that I lived in in Jacksonville, FL, and ask them what happens--when you ever tax businesses--to their jobs.
I could get into a lot of other discussions, but the bottom line is, I didn't have a problem with the tax provisions. I actually wish that the tax had been in the content of the first bill and that we had taken the time to get the Medicaid policy right.
But I am back here again to talk about the Medicaid policy because we have to get it right. One of the reasons I decided to resign when I was confronted with the challenge of opposing this bill--I should say ``retire,'' not ``resign.'' I am still here--was to make the point that getting this policy right was more important than my getting reelected. I think the Medicaid policy in this bill is so fundamentally flawed that if we don't correct it that my colleagues--red State or blue State Republicans, purple State Republicans, and red State Republicans--may end up being guilty of almost the identical mistake that Barack Obama made when he forced ObamaCare down our throats without seeking a single Republican vote to get policy that made sense.
I was so convinced that Obama was wrong that I quit my job and worked full time to get the North Carolina legislature ready for only being in the majority for the second time since the Civil War as I was so convinced the policy was going to be wrong a year before it got implemented and that the Democrats had overreached. I became the second Republican speaker of the house in North Carolina, since the Civil War, based on a bad healthcare decision.
The policy that the House sent us in the reconciliation bill was good policy for Medicaid. It had a work requirement, which I support; it had all kinds of policies for waste, fraud, and abuse that made sense; and it saved $100 billion over 10 years. But then somebody in the White House tried to convince the Senate that they should up the ante for $200 billion more in revenue to pass policy that will do, I think, irreparable damage not only in the policy but in the politics, but we have time to fix it.
The reason I came to the floor today on the birthday of Medicaid is to say I believe the President does not want to harm qualified beneficiaries of Medicaid, but this bill will in its current form. There is a way to fix it. There is a way to have President Trump's legacy deliver on his promise not to push people off of Medicaid and government support systems who qualify for them. I am not talking about the ones who probably shouldn't be on it. There is a way to fix it, but if we don't fix it, I believe that our President's legacy--President Trump, whom I have supported; I have supported each one of his election efforts, and I support him to this day--is at risk if we don't recognize we are done and move on to the next thing.
We don't have to touch a line of the tax policy. We can have a discussion about some of the renewable energy, but I am not going to have that discussion. I want to have a discussion about something that I believe could be the Republicans' ObamaCare. Now, there are some States that probably are not affected substantially, but the majority is. I believe, if we come together and work on this policy and also work on the policy that is set to expire at the end of September--and that is some of the subsidies for the healthcare exchanges for ObamaCare--we could get this right, and this President's legacy will be righting the mistake that was made by Obama and avoiding the mistake that his advisers have told him he should pursue.
So I want the President of the United States and my colleagues in the Senate body to know I am unbridled by any political considerations for the next 17 months, and I stand ready to work with my Republican colleagues and Democrats who are willing to be bipartisan and do something right for our healthcare policy here to get this right. And if I do nothing else in my remaining 17 months, that is worth the effort.
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