Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2025

Floor Speech

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Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chairman, as ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, I am responsible for funding programs and services that the American people rely on.

I also see the importance of programs like Medicaid, which help tens of millions of people afford health insurance. After all of their talk of lowering the cost of living, Republicans wasted no time in making their real priorities clear. For this majority, billionaires and the biggest corporations always come first.

Elon Musk and President Trump are hard at work trying to gut Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, which helps nearly 100 million Americans afford health insurance, medications, and lifesaving care.

Nationwide, Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program provide medical coverage to nearly 4 in 10 children. Almost 40 percent of the children in the United States get their healthcare through Medicaid.

These programs were designed, improved, and expanded over decades by both parties to help people deal with the high costs of healthcare, and they have delivered for so many families. In my district alone, there are 229,000 people on Medicaid, including 79,000 children and 33,000 seniors. Medicaid paid for 3,000 births last year, providing comprehensive prenatal, delivery, and postpartum care to newborns and mothers. These are programs that help families and children. Medicaid works.

Elon Musk is only interested in helping the richest among us. His dream is to fully extend more than $4.5 trillion worth of tax breaks to his billionaire friends and the wealthiest corporations in the world.

How will they pay for these tax cuts and pay for this massive giveaway? Republicans want to pay for this with cuts to Medicaid, $880 billion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, putting coverage at risk for millions of Americans and raising their premiums.

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Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chairman, who bears the brunt of these cuts: seniors, children, low-income families, people with disabilities, those struggling. The most high healthcare costs impact the first ones left behind.

Republicans are coming for SNAP next, threatening 40 million Americans who are just trying to put food on the table. Democrats will stand where we always do, on the side of the middle class, against yet another reckless Republican budget that steals even more wealth for the billionaire class.

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