Republicans Continue to Hide from the Health Care Devastation They Created
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In today’s hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, Trump’s Republican allies raised a number of potential ineffective healthcare reforms.
All of their proposals would fail to actually address the health care crisis they created when they passed massive cuts to Medicaid and refused to extend the tax credits for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) premiums in order to provide huge tax giveaways for billionaires.
Public Citizen Co-President Lisa Gilbert issued the following statement:
“Today we saw multiple attempts to pass the buck on the damage Trump and Republicans in Congress have inflicted on our health care system. In service of tax cuts for billionaires and gifts for health corporations, Trump and Congressional Republicans have worked systematically to put health care out of reach for millions of Americans.
“Cuts to Medicaid and the failure to extend ACA credits will strip health insurance from 17 million Americans and drive up costs for 20 million more. They even shut down the government to avoid fixing the premiums crisis point. In their most generous moments, Trump and Republicans propose to offset this by directing Americans into junk health plans that enrich insurers and rip off consumers. Trump and Congressional Republicans’ cruelty will make health care more expensive, and Americans will struggle, suffer or die as a result.
“In the short term – days, not weeks or months – Congress must extend the ACA tax credits to bring down costs, particularly for patients shopping for coverage right now. The time to make this fix is quickly running out. In the longer term, we must improve Medicare and expand it to everyone in the country. Only Medicare for All would guarantee that everyone in the U.S. can get the health care they need when they need it. The time has come to join our peer nations in providing universal health care. It is achievable at a fraction of the cost of our current broken system.”