Political Quotes

“I am here to join so many of my colleagues to oppose efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Outright repeal without a replacement plan will hurt hundreds of thousands of people in New Hampshire as well as millions across this country. The estimate is anywhere from 20 million to 30 million people who will lose their health insurance coverage. There are all kinds of reasons why this is a bad idea. Many of those have been addressed by my colleagues very eloquently. I wish to speak about a couple of those reasons. The first is one Senator Durbin alluded to earlier; that is, what repeal of this law will mean for the heroin and opioid epidemic that is facing New Hampshire and so many States across this country. Repeal will dramatically worsen that epidemic because it will deny treatment for people who are abusing substances, and it will also deny them access to mental health services. That will mean a surge in overdose deaths, and it will reverse so much of the progress we are beginning to make. I understand that sweeping health care reform is not easy. We all know the Affordable Care Act is not perfect. It needs work. The way to address it is not to repeal it, it is to work together to make it better. Rather than rush to destroy the Affordable Care Act with no replacement in sight, we should be working together, on a bipartisan basis, to make commonsense improvements to the law. It can be done.…”