Establishing the Congressional Budget for the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2025 and Setting Forth the Appropriate Budgetary Levels for Fiscal Years 2026 Through 2034

Floor Speech

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Ms. HASSAN. Madam President, I want to thank my colleague from Wisconsin, Senator Baldwin, for such excellent, poignant, moving descriptions of the real cost of this budget plan that we are on the floor to consider tonight.

I rise today to join my colleagues and the people of New Hampshire in standing up against the attempt by the Trump administration and some of my Republican colleagues to effectively end Medicaid as we know it and add $37 trillion over the next 30 years to our national debt, all in order to pay for more tax giveaways for corporate special interests and billionaires.

Americans of every political stripe are alarmed because this bid to end Medicaid as we know it will lead to more families, more children becoming sick and unable to get care, and because ending Medicaid as we know it will devastate our economy, weaken our workforce, and, most of all, make our people less free.

Medicaid is a pillar of America's healthcare system. Tens of millions of Americans, including working Americans, pregnant women, and millions of children depend on Medicaid every day for routine care, for treatment for chronic illnesses, for lifesaving care from serious illnesses, for treatment for addiction, and for much more.

No legislation has done more to allow more Americans to live longer and healthier lives than the bills that established Medicaid and Medicare and the efforts that followed to strengthen both of these landmark laws.

So before we proceed, let's take a step back for a moment and remember that Congress created Medicaid for two simple reasons. Prior to Medicaid's creation, a great swath of our country--tens of millions of Americans--were forced to try and get by without healthcare. For many working people and their families, the kind of routine and preventive care that many today take for granted, were luxuries. Serious illnesses were often left untreated, becoming virtual death sentences.

We established and later expanded Medicaid because we understood that, in a country as great as ours, we don't turn our backs on our neighbors. But we also created Medicaid because we know that it is in all of our economic interests to have more healthy people. When more people are healthy and able to work, they can get ahead and stay ahead, provide a better life for their family, join the workforce, and, in so doing, make our economy stronger.

There is, of course, much more work to do to make healthcare more affordable for all of our people. But Medicaid saves lives. Over the course of the program's history, Medicaid has allowed hundreds of millions of Americans who otherwise would be uninsured to live healthier lives and to build a future.

But now the Trump administration and some of my Republican colleagues are poised to end Medicaid as we know it in order to pay for tax breaks for corporate special interests and billionaires.

The Republican plan to eviscerate Medicaid would be devastating to our country. The Republican plan is, unsurprisingly, short on details. But they have put forward proposals that, if you do the math, mean cutting a third of Federal Medicaid funding, all to give billionaires and corporate special interests a tax break.

Now, let's look at what this decidedly unreasonable, outrageous, and dangerous plan would do. Cutting Medicaid by a third means living in a country where millions of children no longer have healthcare; a country where more of our friends and neighbors get sick and can't afford to see a doctor; a country where more of our friends and neighbors stay out of the workforce because they can't afford treatments for chronic conditions like lupus, making them too sick to work; a country where families who have children with disabilities can't find adequate coverage to provide the kind of complex care, both at home and in school, that these children need. One issue, in particular, I want to highlight is the way in which slashing Medicaid would weaken our fight against addiction.

New Hampshire has been hit hard by the fentanyl crisis. These Medicaid cuts could kick hundreds of thousands of people struggling with addiction off of Medicaid, out of treatment, and off the road to recovery. This will, among other things, make law enforcement's job even harder, and it will make our children less safe.

So let's be clear about what the Republican plan to slash Medicaid will do. It will make people less healthy. It will weaken our workforce and hurt our economy. The fight against fentanyl will only get tougher, and more people will die who otherwise could have lived.

In the administration's plan to eviscerate Medicaid, the cuts only appear on the page as percentages and dollar signs, but their impact will be felt by real people.

My office, as has Senator Baldwin's, Senator Kim's, and Senator Durbin's, has been deluged with letters and calls from constituents who are concerned about the administration's attack on Medicaid.

I could tell you hundreds of stories, but instead I will just give you three.

There is Michelle from Manchester. She was diagnosed with a rare and frequently fatal form of cancer that upended her career and her life. To go through the long process of cancer treatment by paying out of pocket would be daunting, perhaps even prohibitive for most anyone. But Michelle was covered by Medicaid. She got the care that she needed. She got healthy. She was able to go back to work. She is now cancer-free because of her courage and strength and because she was covered by Medicaid.

Then there is Noa from Merrimack. Now, Noa is 20 years old and experiences disabilities and is blind. She has had to face challenges that few of us can imagine. But thanks in part to the support that she has received through Medicaid, she has been able to have many of the opportunities that all parents want for their kids and that all kids want for themselves.

She has a part-time job at a nearby bank. She does charity work delivering flowers to seniors. She loves horseback riding and has competed as a Special Olympian. She accomplished all this thanks to her bravery, optimism, and generosity, but she may not have even gotten that chance without Medicaid.

And then there is Cheri from Lebanon. Like other Granite Staters, she has had struggles with addiction, as well as mental health challenges, but Cheri was eligible for Medicaid. She got treatment and went into recovery. She was able to go back to work. Today, Cheri is a perinatal peer support educator and coordinator for Dartmouth Health. She helps families every day. Because she got care when she needed it, she is now working to provide care for others, touching untold and unknown numbers of lives through her work. And she was my guest this year at the President's joint address to Congress. But none of her recovery, employment, and lifesaving work would have been possible or happened without Medicaid.

So if the administration intends to eviscerate Medicaid, if they intend to go through with their plan to cut Medicaid by a third to pay for a tax break for billionaires, then before they do, they should at least stop and explain to these three people--Michelle, Noa, Cheri--who is the one that they want to kick off of Medicaid.

How would any of us be better off if any of these three people are forced to go without healthcare?

Most Americans are proud of our capacity to come together and ensure that our friends and neighbors can get healthcare and be able to work and raise families. But this administration evidently considers the provision of lifesaving healthcare to Americans from all walks of life to be a problem.

Now, beyond the huge pricetag of this budget plan--a plan that explodes the deficit by 37 trillion more dollars over 30 years--and let's be clear: The Republican budget writers are going to use accounting gimmicks to try to hide this cost. And let's be clear too that the $37 trillion in additional debt won't be used to improve healthcare. It is to pay for tax breaks for billionaires.

But there is another cost to the President's attacks on Medicaid, because as important as it is that we protect the healthcare provided by Medicare--and that is tremendously important--protecting Medicaid healthcare marks neither the beginning nor the end of what we need to do to improve healthcare in our country and make it more affordable.

We need to confront real challenges in our country's healthcare system. Big Pharma keeps drug prices too high. We have the best doctors in the world, but too few people can afford to see them. Too many Americans live with chronic diseases.

Labor and delivery centers across our country are more and more scarce, and rural hospitals are struggling. Americans need to summon our best ideas and our best efforts to meet these challenges, but we will not make progress so long as this administration continues to keep us trapped in old debates and tries to unravel bipartisan support for the progress that we have already made.

Of course, it doesn't have to be this way. When I was Governor of New Hampshire, we managed to expand Medicaid and balance the budget at the same time, and we did both on a bipartisan basis. We did it with the support of many business leaders and law enforcement leaders who didn't always vote the same way come November, but they did agree that we are all better off when people are healthy.

President Trump and congressional Republicans are presenting us with a false choice. We don't have to choose between keeping the status quo on the one hand and blowing up our healthcare system on the other. We don't have to buy the falsehood that, somehow, we have to close rural hospitals and throw seniors out of our nursing homes to improve our healthcare system. There are better ideas, and a whole lot of them are bipartisan.

There are bipartisan bills right now to lower the costs for patients when they go to the doctor by implementing something called site neutrality. There are bipartisan bills that will lower drug costs by bringing more generic drugs to market. But these ideas only help if there is a functioning healthcare system to build on--a functioning healthcare system, as challenged as it is, that includes Medicaid.

As Americans, we don't shrink from challenges. We don't surrender to cynicism and lies. We work together. We do hard things. We do what it takes to build a better future for our country, and we do it in a way that brings all of us along together, and that includes ensuring that all of us have healthcare. That is the way we created Medicaid. That is the way we expanded Medicaid. And it is through that same spirit of hard work and optimism that we can overcome the healthcare challenges of today if we can summon the political will to do it.

A will has been so sorely lacking since this President arrived on the scene. The Senate should not pass a budget that rips healthcare away from millions of Americans--60,000 of whom live in my State--just to give tax cuts to billionaires, but that is what this budget will do. It is un-American, and it is shameful.

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