Gregory Meeks: “when I first saw the headlines of the bill, I looked at the bill, it came across my desk, because everybody wants to do…”

“when I first saw the headlines of the bill, I looked at the bill, it came across my desk, because everybody wants to do something about small business. I first said to my staff, let's get on this bill; it will help small business. But then after I read it a second time and a third time, the devil is always in the details. The devil is in the fine print. The devil is in what you read. When I really read the bill, I found that this bill would actually be devastating; it is what we call short-term gain for long-term pain. When you look over the years, the pain that really will happen to people who we are trying to help in the long-term will be devastating. Then when I looked even a little bit closer and tried to watch it to see how it affected those low-wage earners that my colleague just talked about and minorities and women in particular, then I noticed another substantial devastating event, the fact that what this bill does because many of the people that we want to help, they happen to be minority and women and how they disproportionately will be affected by this bill. In fact, when you look at it, certain diseases because of people who are of color, Latino and African American, you look at approximately 2.8 million or 13 percent of all African Americans and 2 million or 10.2 percent of all Latino Americans have diabetes. They would not be covered under this. They could be cherrypicked.”