Political Quotes

“I want to thank my colleague from the State of Washington for outlining the challenges presented now to Medicaid in terms of efforts by Republicans, which I have described with three words: decimate, slash, and sabotage. I think all three are an accurate description of what they have tried to do. But I am also grateful that Senator Murray was highlighting some of the great benefits of the program in her initial remarks on the floor. We just had a report yesterday from a great organization called Protect Our Care. I will not read the entire report, but I was struck by a few findings that they summarized in that report, quoting from various studies about the impact of Medicaid. Here are just a few. A number of these findings relate to Medicaid expansion, which was the expansion of Medicaid that became law when the Affordable Care Act was passed back in 2010, but it is only now, years after Medicaid expansion has gone into effect, that the impact is being felt in a very positive way. For just a couple of highlights here on Medicaid expansion, for example, expansion was associated with lower rates of maternal mortality. In this case, the research was done by the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families. The research also found that States that had expanded Medicaid experienced 1.6 fewer maternal deaths per 100,000 women than States that refused to expand Medicaid.…”