Medical Debt
Floor Speech
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Ms. TLAIB. Mr. Speaker, no one should go bankrupt because they get sick.
I was proud to be able to join Director Chopra of the CFPB along with Congresswoman Debbie Dingell in hosting a roundtable on the impact of medical debt on our families.
We talked about the groundbreaking proposal by the Biden administration that would change the lives of millions of people where we would ban and prohibit medical debt from appearing on people's credit reports.
I know this step is long overdue, having introduced legislation like the Restoring Unfairly Impaired Credit and Protecting Consumers Act which would prohibit outright the reporting of medical debt on consumer reports.
Today, 15 million Americans have $49 billion in medical debt on their credit reports. In Wayne County, which is the largest county in Michigan, nearly one in six residents have medical debt.
Behind these numbers are real people. They are our families, whose lives are being impacted by this crushing burden all because they got sick.
We heard this firsthand from one of my residents, Livonia resident Erika Price, who was devastated by our broken healthcare system while watching her husband's body deteriorate.
For many, medical debt means sleepless nights worrying about making ends meet. Some families go bankrupt. Others lose their homes.
This is wrong, and, again, no one chooses to be sick.
The burden of medical debt can also haunt families by lowering their credit score, preventing them from getting a job, being able to rent a home, or even be able to get a car or a small business loan.
To address this crisis, I joined Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Ro Khanna in introducing the Medical Debt Cancellation Act to eliminate medical debt completely.
We know that we have sick care in our country, not healthcare. We know that this is also an economic and social justice issue and that many of our low-income families, our most vulnerable, some of my seniors even with insurance, are starting to see medical debt rise. We also know many of our Black and Latino neighbors are more likely to be impacted.
We know that without Medicare for All, millions of people will lack coverage while expenses continue to rise.
We all deserve so much better than a broken healthcare system that profits off of sickness and leaves more than 20 million people without health insurance.
No one should lose their home or have to declare bankruptcy because they got sick. Medical debt should never haunt someone financially. This body must take action to relieve this burden for many of our residents. Michigan Needs Public Power
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Ms. TLAIB. Mr. Speaker, I am sick and tired of DTE Energy's corporate greed, while many residents suffer the consequences and go days without power in Michigan.
Our families can't afford more power outages that spoil their groceries. And guess what? They only get $25, sometimes $35 in reimbursement. It ruins their medicine that is in the refrigerator. It leaves our neighbors without access to critical medical devices, all because DTE would rather pay out their executives--look it up--and their shareholders rather than ensure reliability.
They defer maintenance and would rather pay their shareholders instead of making sure the grid is strong and reliable.
Last month, with record-breaking heat waves, temperatures reached 95 degrees in southeast Michigan while over 200,000 residents went without power due to DTE Energy's failure to invest in their infrastructure upgrades while continuing to raise rates on our families.
The company made $1.4 billion in profits last year alone. Their CEO, Jerry Norcia, makes $10 million a year, but they are begging the Michigan Public Service Commission to approve more rate hikes--I think it is the third or fourth already--and asking our residents to pick up the tab for their executives to travel on corporate jets. It is shameful.
The Michigan Public Service Commission should reject these outrageous rate increases. They are not reasonable. They are not fair. We need utilities that serve the people, not shareholders.
We need public power. DTE and other for-profit utilities should be turned into publicly owned and operated services. We see it over and over again by DTE's actions that we cannot allow these corporations to continue because they are always going to put profit before our people. Falling Short
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Ms. TLAIB. Mr. Speaker, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, is often hailed as landmark civil rights law or the most important civil rights laws in our country offering a promise of equal education for all of our children with disabilities.
We continue to fall short though in this promise.
The 50-year-old law is underfunded to this day. We passed it in 1975, and we promised to pay 40 percent of the cost of the Federal mandate on our school districts, and we are only reaching about 14 to sometimes 17 percent.
We are not doing enough.
Paraprofessionals alone in Detroit are working without a contract right now. Our Federal Government needs to cover 40 percent of the extra costs of special education.
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