Schumer Floor Remarks on TrumpCare and the Upcoming Budget

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer today delivered remarks on the Senate floor outlining concerns regarding House Republicans’ ACA replacement bill as well as Senate Democrats concerns over including a call to pay for the Mexico border wall in the upcoming budget. Below are his remarks:

First, let me thank the attending physician for quickly coming to the aid of one of our stenographers. They all do an amazing job. They are the unsung heroes. And we wish the stenographer a speedy recovery.

Mr. President, as the House continues to rush through their plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, I want to again point out just how different this bill is from what the president promised. For a while now, I’ve spoken about how this president talks like a populist and promises one thing, but governs from the hard-right, delivering something entirely different. President Trump talked tough on Wall Street, but appointed Wall Street insiders to his Administration and started to try to roll back Wall Street reform. He said he’d stick up for working people, but just about one hour after his inauguration when he said that,  one of his first actions as president made it harder to afford a mortgage. The Republican plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act is the most recent and most glaring example of this trend.

There is a stunning gap between how the president talks about health care and what his bill – TrumpCare – would do. The bold promises of better care for everyone at lower costs come from an alternative reality than his legislation, which studies show will cover fewer people at higher costs. Like much of his Administration thus far, TrumpCare is another game of “say one thing, do another.”

Say you’ll protect the working people of America and then go forward in ways that hurt them and hurt them severely.

Let me just offer a few examples of TrumpCare and how the words the president stated are so different than the reality.

During the campaign, the president said that he was not going to cut Medicaid “like every other Republican.” He tweeted that he was “the first and only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.” Let me repeat that – these are President Trump’s own tweets – he will be the – he said in his tweet, he will be the first and only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. TrumpCare, however, directly contrary to the president’s promise during the campaign, takes an axe to Medicaid, which covers 68 million Americans. Instead of having the federal government match a percentage of each states’ Medicaid costs – which can rise and fall according to how much the state actually needs -- TrumpCare would give states only a fixed amount of money per enrollee each year. If costs are higher than expected, TrumpCare wouldn’t cover the gap. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, this change would amount to a $370 billion cut to Medicaid over 10 years. The president said he was the first and only GOP candidate to promise not to cut Medicaid; his bill cuts it by nearly $400 billion.

Nearly two thirds of Americans in nursing homes rely on Medicaid. This cut goes right after seniors, and could make it much more difficult on you if you’re a 45-year old with a parent in a nursing home. You’d be faced with a horrible choice—take your parent out of the home and not give them the care they need, or shell out huge amounts, thousands and thousands of dollars out of your pocket, which you may not have. So much for the president not cutting Medicaid. It’s a broken promise to so many poor people, elderly people in nursing homes and their children.

The president said “we’re going to have a much better health care plan at much less money.” But studies have shown that if you’re in the middle class, TrumpCare will increase your costs by about $1,500 a year. If you’re an older American between 55 and 64, your costs would increase by over $5,000 a year. The 55 to 64 year olds may be the most vulnerable, their healthcare costs tend to be higher than others. And their costs would go up by $5,000 a year – another promise broken by President Trump when it comes to TrumpCare.

The president said that “we’re going to have insurance for everybody.” Some estimates of TrumpCare suggest that it will kick roughly 15 million Americans off the insurance rolls. The CBO will likely have a more definitive estimate later today, putting an exclamation point on what we already know: TrumpCare will cost millions of Americans their health insurance. Another promise by Donald Trump broken.

The president spoke repeatedly on the campaign trail about expanding treatment for Americans suffering from opioid addiction. But TrumpCare would end the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that addiction services and mental health treatment be covered under Medicaid in the 31 states that chose to expand Medicaid.

The president promised more help for those suffering from opioid addiction. The president’s action in TrumpCare cuts it.

Even on drug prices, the president says one thing and does another -- Only a few weeks ago, the president stood before both houses of Congress and said, “We should work to bring down the artificially high price of drugs and bring them down immediately.” So you’d think TrumpCare would have something that does that. Unfortunately, it does not. But TrumpCare does absolutely nothing to address the high cost of drugs. In fact, drug prices might start going up faster. TrumpCare eliminates a current requirement that insurers actually give patients the value of the health insurance they are paying for. This is a blank check to insurers to cover less and charge more out-of-pocket for a whole host of services. Most experts agree that insurers could charge much more for prescriptions drugs or even ration care.

So again, another Trump promise broken. He was going to work on getting costs lower immediately—not in his bill, which he introduced a few weeks later. It might indeed raise prices for the cost of drugs for average Americans.

There is no angle from which you can look at this bill to make it match how the president talks about it. It violates almost every specific promise he’s ever made about health care.

And in a broader sense, it violates what this president promised to working America. The president promised to be a champion for working America; he promised to be their voice. That’s how he presented himself in his Inaugural Address. But TrumpCare would hurt working Americans the most; making them pay more for less care. It seems the only people who benefit – the only group who benefit financially, are those in the top 0.1 percent of earners, TrumpCare gives you a nearly $200,000 tax break on average. This is the only group that benefits – they may not be the only group but they are the group that benefits the most, far and away.  But if you’re in the middle class, if you’re struggling to make it into the working class, if you’re older and from a rural area, your costs are going to go up by thousands of dollars a year. Many of these people voted for the president. But the only people who get that huge tax break on an average of 200,000 per year are the top 0.1 percent.

In a very real sense, Donald Trump is giving a huge tax break to the wealthy and then making working Americans, average Americans, pay for it. To some, it might seem that the whole purpose of TrumpCare is to give that tax break for the wealthy.

In his inaugural address, President Trump spoke of an America where “for too long, a small group…has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.” TrumpCare seems designed to fulfill that vision, not alter it. It makes it even easier on that small group, shifting even more costs onto the people. The first few months of the Trump Administration has been broken promise after broken promise to working families. Trump’s words are “we’re going to help working America, middle class America,” but Trump’s actions take the burdens off the top 1 percent and put them on the shoulders of all other Americans. And TrumpCare might constitute the greatest broken promise of them all.

I suspect that’s why that Republican Leadership in the House is rushing this bill through their chamber. They don’t want the American people to see it and learn what’s in it. I don’t think they want their own members to have much time to consider it. That’s why it was released on a Monday and a vote in committee was scheduled only a few days later. Already the bill has gone through committee markups in the House without a score from the CBO. After years of criticizing Democrats for rushing through health care, after chanting “read the bill, read the bill” over and over again – Republicans are trying to pass their health care plan in two months when Democrats took almost a full year to debate and pass the ACA. Even Republican Senators like my friend from Arkansas, Sen. Cotton, are telling their colleagues in the House to pause and start over.

The Republicans in the House ought to listen, because this mess of a bill would badly hurt millions of Americans. Even though we disagree on the substance, I would echo my friend from Arkansas in saying to House Republicans: stop and think about this. You can drop repeal and come talk to us Democrats about reasonable fixes to the Affordable Care Act, instead of blindly moving forward with this sham of a bill. That would be a much better way for your party, and a much better approach for our country.

And one final point on another matter, Mr. President, today, the Democratic Leadership of the Senate and the Chair of the Appropriations Committee sent a letter to Leader McConnell and Chairman Cochran. We, of course, laid out our concerns about the budget and reiterated the guiding rules that helped us pass a budget for the first time in a while last year.

We believe that we should stick to the spending levels that were agreed to in December, that we should maintain a parity between defense and non-defense, and there should be no poison-pill riders.

It is rumored that one of those poison pill riders might be a supplemental added to the CR that would call for paying for President Trump's wall. That will not stand. The president wants a wall but hasn't answered so many questions about it. What about eminent domain and the procedures to acquire land from private landowners? What's the design of the wall? Where's it going to be located? How's it going to be paid for and how much does it cost? And don't you think we ought to give the president time to have Mexico pay for the wall? That's what he said throughout his campaign: Mexico will pay for it.

And so that's why both Democratic and Republican members of Congress that represent the border states object to this wall. It will be inappropriate, in our judgment, to insist on the inclusion of such funding in a must-pass appropriations bill that is needed for the Republican majority in control of Congress to avert a government shutdown. It is truly a poison pill and we would urge our colleagues not to allow the president to include this in a must-pass bill that avoids shutdown of the government.