Schumer Floor Remarks on the Republican Healthcare Bill Failure and the Need for Bipartisanship
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer today delivered remarks on the Senate floor regarding Senate Republicans’ recent failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the need for bipartisanship to repair the current health care system. Below are his remarks:
Mr. President, last night we learned that the current Republican healthcare bill lacks enough support to even reach the floor of the U.S. Senate.
After numerous delays, false starts, false predictions and two pulled votes, it should be crystal clear to everyone on the other side of the aisle that the core of the bill is unworkable.
It's time to move on. It’s time to start over. Rather than repeating the same failed, partisan process yet again, Republicans should work with Democrats on a bill that lowers premiums, provides long term stability to the markets and improves our health care system.
I heard the Republican Leader this morning say that Democrats “decided early on that they did not want to engage seriously” on healthcare. In the same speech, the Republican Leader also admitted that the very first thing the Republican Majority did this Congress was to pass reconciliation so they could pass healthcare on a party-line vote, 50 needed – no Democrats needed. Early on the Majority leader told Democrats ‘we don’t need you, we don’t want you.’ Respectfully, I take issue with the idea that Democrats didn’t want to engage on healthcare – the Majority Leader admitted that he decided the matter for us when he locked Democrats out of the process at the outset.
At the very beginning of this Congress, President Trump and Leader McConnell said ‘don’t come knocking at our door on healthcare. We don’t need you.’ Now that their one-party effort has largely failed, we hope they will change their tune.
It seems like many Republicans are ready for a truly bipartisan effort on healthcare indeed. My friend Senator McCain has urged it quite strongly, saying: “The Congress must now return to regular order, hold hearings, [and] receive input from members of both parties…” And he said that while recuperating in Arizona, so that’s how strongly he feels about it. Other Republican Senators have made similar comments.
But the Republican Leader plans to ignore their advice and instead plans on holding a proxy vote on a straight “repeal” of our healthcare law first.
Make no mistake about it, passing repeal without a replacement would be a disaster. Our healthcare system would implode, millions would lose coverage, coverage for millions more would be diminished. Our healthcare system would be in such a deep hole that repair would be nearly impossible.
In fact, passing repeal and having it go into effect two years later is in many ways worse than the Republican healthcare bill that was just rejected by my Republican colleagues.
It’s like if our healthcare system was a patient who came in and needed some medicine. The Republicans proposed a surgery. That operation was a failure. Now, Republicans are proposing a second surgery that will surely kill the patient. Medicine is needed – bipartisan medicine. Not a second surgery. We urge our Republican colleagues to change their tune.
Passing “repeal” now is not a door to bipartisan solutions, as the Majority Leader suggested this morning. Rather it is a disaster. The door to bipartisanship is open right now, not with repeal but with an effort to improve the existing system. The door is open right now, Republican leadership only needs to walk through it, as many Republican Senators are urging them.
The door is to accept the progress we’ve made in our healthcare system and work to improve it. The Affordable Care Act isn’t perfect. But repealing all of the good things about the law will create such chaos that there will hardly be anything left to repair.
Republicans don’t need to wreak havoc on our healthcare system first in order to get Democrats to the table. We’re ready to sit down, right now, if Republicans abandon cuts to Medicaid, abandon huge tax breaks for the wealthy, and agree to go through the regular order – through the committees, with hearings, onto the floor, with time for amendments. That’s how we perfect legislation here. That’s how it’s been done for 200 years. Almost inevitably, when you try to draft something behind closed doors and not vet it with the public, it becomes a failure, in this case, a disaster.
The door to bipartisanship is open right now, Republicans only need to walk through it.
And I’d remind my Republican friends that the CBO has already scored the idea of a clean “repeal” bill: and it would be a catastrophe. Listen to what nonpartisan CBO – the head of CBO appointed by the Republican Leader of the Senate and the Republican Leader of the House. Here’s what CBO said about repeal: It would cause 32 million Americans to lose their insurance, premiums would double, while cutting taxes for households with incomes over $1 million by over $50,000 a year.
It would end Medicaid expansion with no grace period or option for states who like their Medicaid expansion and want to keep it. In many ways, it’s just as cruel, if not crueler, to Medicaid as the Trumpcare bill, in a different way.
So I would expect the same Senators who were concerned about the Trumpcare bill’s Medicaid cuts will be equally concerned about what “repeal and delay” would do to Medicaid.
Many of my Republican friends rejected roundly the idea of “repeal and delay” several months ago, at the beginning of the year when President Trump first proposed it and it seemed like that’s what Republicans would do. Here are just some of the names back then who said repeal and then replace later doesn’t work. Here they were: Cassidy, Alexander, Collins, Corker, Cotton, Hatch, Isakson, Moran, McCain, Murkowski, Paul.
Well, I would tell those colleagues and all the others, the idea hasn’t magically gotten better with age.
It’s still nothing more than a cut-and-run approach to healthcare that will leave millions of Americans out in the cold and raise costs on everyone: the young, the old, the sick, the healthy, working Americans, and middle class families…everyone will be hurt but the very, very wealthy.
Mr. President, every day that Republicans spend on trying to pass their now failed, partisan Trumpcare bill…
…Every day they spend cooking up new tricks to bully their members to get on a healthcare bill is another day wasted...another day that could have been spent working on real improvements to our health care system.
Democrats want to work with our colleagues on the Republican side to stabilize the marketplaces and improve the cost and quality of care. And we want to do it via regular order, a process this body has used time and time again to produce consensus, bipartisan, historic legislation.
The Majority Leader said, in 2014 in a speech entitled “Restoring the Senate”, that QUOTE – this is Senator McConnell - “When the senate is allowed to work the way it was designed to, it arrives at a result acceptable to people all along the political spectrum. But if it's an assembly line for one party's partisan legislative agenda,” it creates “instability and strife” rather than “good, stable law.”
I want to repeat that. These are the words of Senator McConnell. I hope Leader McConnell is listening and remembers these words. He hasn’t for the last six months and its only led to trouble for him and his Republican colleagues in the Senate, so let me read it again. 2014 speech, “Restoring the Senate,” author, Senator McConnell. “When the Senate is allowed to work the way it was designed to, it arrives at a result acceptable to people all along the political spectrum. But if it's an assembly line for one party's partisan legislative agenda,” it creates “instability and strife” rather than “good, stable law.”
Leader McConnell, I couldn’t agree more.
It’s time to start over on healthcare – abandon the idea of cutting Medicaid to give a tax break to the wealthy, abandon this new “repeal and run” – and use the regular order to “arrive at a result acceptable to people all along the political spectrum,” as Leader McConnell once said. I dare say it would create a much better result for the American people as well.
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