WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Maggie Hassan delivered remarks on the floor of the U.S. Senate late last night on the harms of the Republican budget bill, which will take health care away from tens of thousands of Granite Staters, raise costs for families, make massive cuts to health care, and explode the national debt by trillions of dollars in order to pay for tax giveaways for corporate special interests and billionaires.
Senator Hassan also took to the airwaves with interviews on WMUR and MSNBC to make sure Granite Staters are hearing about the devastating impacts of the Republican budget bill.
Click here to see Senator Hassan’s remarks.
Full Remarks as Delivered:
I’m here today because I’m joining the majority of Americans who are deeply alarmed by this plan from the President and his Congressional allies, a plan that will make life less affordable for more Americans.
When we return home for this Fourth of July, it’d be nice to be able to tell our constituents that we came together and passed bipartisan legislation to help bring down costs for families.
Instead, my colleagues who vote for this legislation will have to explain why, at a time when families’ pocketbooks are strained, they chose to support a partisan bill to make American life even less affordable.
What will America look like once this bill takes effect? Millions of people will have lost their health coverage thanks to the largest cut to Medicaid in American history. More people won’t be able to afford preventive care and cancer screenings. And more people will get sick.
Health care premiums will surge for everyone because fewer people will have care and the number of uninsured Americans will increase. Rural hospitals will close their doors because they lost Medicaid reimbursements that helped keep them afloat.
More people, especially in states like mine, will have to make long car rides just to get to a hospital 50 miles away…in those desperate moments when minutes feel like hours, and hours like eternities.
Seniors will be thrown into grave peril because this bill threatens hundreds of billions in Medicare cuts. And once this plan eviscerates food assistance programs, it will be much harder for families to afford to put food on the table...at a time when groceries are already far too expensive...let there be no mistake, more families and children who today are being fed will go hungry. And all the while, our children will be burdened with trillions more in debt.
In the name of what cause is all this done? Well, it’s all to pay for tax breaks for billionaires.
This bill will also make us an America where our people are less free. In New Hampshire, during my time as Governor we adopted Medicaid Expansion with support from both political parties – and we balanced the budget at the same time.
We understood that with health comes freedom; the freedom to work and provide for one’s family, the freedom from disease and despair, the freedom that comes from – why do I even have to say this – being alive. Granite Staters also understood that a great country like ours treats its people with great dignity.
In America, we don’t sacrifice the health of our neighbors…we don’t let families fall sick…and we do not imperil our economy, our debt, and our workforce…just to pay for a tax giveaway for a billionaire.
So what kind of country will we be with this bill? We will not only be less healthy, but we will be less prosperous and less free…in short, this bill is at odds with what we aspire to be as Americans.
It’s also worth noting how remarkably out of step this bill is with the American people’s plea to bring down costs. In a democracy like ours, theoretically the people’s representatives pass legislation that reflects the aspirations of the majority. I say theoretically because clearly that is not what is happening today.
Indeed, according to the data from the Joint Economic Committee – Minority, if one combines this bill with the President’s tariffs – firefighters, truck drivers, and teachers, for instance, will lose $470 or more next year; while the top 0.1%, that’s people who earn about 4 million dollars or more, will be $348,000 richer.
This bill would take away health care from tens of thousands of Granite Staters and would take a similar toll across the country. Indeed, in both Florida and Texas the number of people who will lose their health insurance is greater than the entire population of New Hampshire...millions of people losing care with a stroke of a pen.
What have these people done to deserve that? All the American people are asking for is for us to help bring down costs – so the President and the Republicans in Congress take away their health care?
Sometimes in Washington we’re faced with bills that fail to fully meet the moment to be sure. But it is rare to find legislation like this – a bill that makes life less affordable during a time when Americans of every political stripe are crying out for lower costs – a bill that seems as if it was drafted just to make a mockery of the wills and wishes of the majority of people in this country.
Lately, many of my colleagues and some political pundits have been talking about this bill as if it were inevitable; a runaway freight train so vast that it cannot be stopped, and in light of this inevitability, they suggest that some of the bill’s deficiencies can just be overlooked. But, of course, this bill was not inevitable – nor is it now.
So let’s be clear – each and every Senator in this body has free will. God given free will. Which means that the measures in this legislation that gut Medicaid weren’t written by mistake or by chance. We didn’t arrive at this day, with a vote on this terrible budget bill, by accident.
Let’s not delude ourselves…we’re only here because a majority in this body decided to ignore the majority of the country and made a series of decisions;
The Republican majority decided to gut Medicaid;
They decided to take away health care from millions;
They decided to raise insurance premiums for the rest of us;
They decided that closed hospitals were a risk worth taking;
They decided that taking food away from hungry kids was acceptable;
They decided that trillions more in debt was not a problem;
The Republican majority decided that depriving the American people of all these things and raising their costs were worth it, just as long as they paid for another tax break for billionaires.
Because that’s the bargain that this Administration along with my Republican colleagues is forcing the American people to accept. Our people will be less healthy, our kids will have more debt, but the President and billionaires like him will get a tax break.
Of course, part of what makes this bill so frustrating is that it includes some individual provisions that I’ve spent years trying to pass into law. This bill includes provisions I support, some even that I authored, like strengthening the R&D tax deduction to support our entrepreneurs and a tax cut for families to make child care more affordable.
I also support this bill’s provisions which would tackle our housing crisis by expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit to bring down the cost of housing, as well as a provision making mortgage insurance tax deductible so that it’s easier to buy a home. And I’d support a bill with real tax cuts for the middle class and small businesses, unlike the token measures included in this bill.
If my Republican colleagues worked across the aisle to draft a bill that brought this bipartisan approach to other critical areas – like health care and food assistance – I’d vote for it.
Instead, my colleagues chose to take these commonsense solutions hostage by linking every good idea to three bad ones – turning this into a purely partisan endeavor.
So yes, I’m glad that some of these bipartisan provisions will be signed into law, but I regret that they aren’t a part of a truly bipartisan effort because of the politics of division and destruction that President Trump brings to Washington.
Now I know that there are many areas of common ground with my Republican colleagues in this body, but it has become far too difficult to move forward on finding solutions when at every turn the President seems far more interested in demonizing and dividing rather than bringing people together.
Turning areas of agreement into weapons to force disagreement…now that’s exactly the kind of cynical politics of division that does lasting damage to our families, our economy, and our democracy.
Now President Trump likely will get this bill passed – he may get enough of the Republican caucus to stand in line once again to pass it. Even though my Republican colleagues know that budget analysts have added up the financial cost of this bill and have told them that it adds trillions upon trillions to our national debt, burdening our children’s future.
But you know as important as the debt is, it’s not the only cost of passing this awful bill. There’s another kind of cost, a cost not simply of dollars and cents. I shouldn’t have to remind this Administration and my colleagues on the other side of the aisle about the nature of this cost – they know it.
But just to be clear, this tax break for corporate special interests and billionaires has a price, a price that can’t be summed up in a budget line or written off during tax season.
Because when we debate health care in America, some dress up these discussions with words like “reconciliation” and “program” and “discretionary spending” but what they’re talking about is being sick and being healthy, what they’re talking about – whether they want to admit it or not – is living and dying.
So how much does this bill cost?
The cost is millions of Americans losing their health care;
The cost is countless families feeling the pain of higher insurance premiums;
The cost is a mother being forced to choose between paying out of pocket for her own care or paying for groceries for her kids.
It’s a price that’s exacted in cancers that go undetected; it’s exacted in chronic illnesses that go untreated; it’s exacted in the health care challenges in our country that continue to go unaddressed because we spend all our energies simply trying to keep our heads above water in floods of the President’s own making.
The price tag is more than dollars and cents; it includes the cost of losing more people from our workforce because they’re too ill to work; it includes the gnawing pains of hunger and the slow toll of malnutrition that will come as food assistance programs are robbed; it includes the anguish of young parents no longer knowing how they will make ends meet;
It includes the lost hopes and deferred dreams of people held back by illness; it includes the cost of having to say more early goodbyes.
What is the price tag of this bill? The price, in the end, is the health and freedom of millions of Americans; a price that will be paid because somewhere on the road that brought us here…here in President Trump’s Washington…some people decided that the health of some child or her mother may be dear, but it doesn’t carry the same weight as a bigger tax return for a billionaire does.
Thank you, Madam President, I yield the floor.
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