Political Quotes

“Mr. President, here we are, with our colleagues on their way home, and I thought it would be helpful to take a minute and give an assessment of where the TrumpCare debate is at this point because we have seen the two major committees in the House act. Some $300 billion was slashed from safety net health programs, while insurance company executives making over $500,000 annually were given a juicy tax break as a bonus. To put this into perspective, this tax break that the insurance companies' CEOs seem to have after two committees in the other body have acted on TrumpCare--the amount of the bonuses for the insurance company executives would be enough to cover the TrumpCare-created shortfall in Oregon's community-based services for the elderly and the disabled two or three times over. What we are talking about is how hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks are going to the fortunate few and special interests, while some of the money is coming from stealing a chunk of those dollars from the Medicare trust fund. And this is very much intertwined with the nominee's work because she would be overseeing Medicare payments to rural hospitals in places like Louisiana and Oregon. What I am going to turn to now is what TrumpCare, based on these two committees, means for rural areas. And, of course, it repeals the Medicaid expansion. It caps the Medicaid Program.…”