H. Con. Res. 14

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Before he leaves the floor, I just wanted to thank my colleague from Georgia for the moral clarity of his remarks tonight.

It is interesting to think for a moment of what we are dealing with and what the context of this budget is. We are living in the wealthiest country in the world, but unlike almost any other industrialized country in the world, we don't provide healthcare to everybody in the United States. This is the wealthiest country in the world. Per capita, we are far wealthier than any other country in the world. And, yet, we made the decision not to provide healthcare to everybody.

And, shockingly, not only are we doing that, we are spending twice what any other industrialized country is spending on healthcare--for worse results.

Do you know that, today, in the United States of America, our life expectancy is 6 years shorter than if you live in an industrialized country in the world that has a universal healthcare system that costs half of what this healthcare system costs?

If you are African American in the United States of America, your life expectancy is 12 years shorter than if you live in a country that has a universal healthcare system that costs half of the one in the United States of America.

And those systems, by the way, are very different. Some of them are all public systems. Some of them are a combination of for-profit and nonprofit and government healthcare. But the thing they share in common is that everybody is covered and that they cost much less than the healthcare that is delivered in the United States of America.

I am sure my colleague from Georgia has the same experience I have in Colorado, which is to notice that every year it seems like healthcare actually becomes more scarce in America--less abundant--even though we are spending all that money. And don't even ask me about mental healthcare, which our families desperately need in the United States of America now. And as a former school superintendent, I can tell you our kids are facing a raging epidemic of mental health issues that are related to COVID, that are related to other challenges they are facing, that are related to the social media algorithms that are ripping their childhoods apart with absolutely no response from this place.

So that is the starting point. And I think I heard my colleague from Georgia talking about how Martin Luther King had said that inequality in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane of all. And I wonder if one of the things he was thinking is that it is shocking and inhumane, in the richest country in the world, that not everybody is covered, even though in every one of these other industrialized countries, people are covered.

And everybody in this room knows that no matter whether you are covered or whether you are not, if you have a sick child, you are going to try to get them a doctor. If you have a sick child, you are going to try to get them to the hospital, whether they are covered or whether they are not.

And one of the reasons why our healthcare system is so expensive is that people don't have primary care; that is to say, they don't have the ability to go in to see a doctor in a timely way, just to get a wellness checkup for themselves or for their kids, just to make sure that everything is OK, so they don't develop a chronic healthcare condition that makes the healthcare much more expensive on the other end and shortens their life.

That is why we have a 6-year life expectancy that is shorter than people in the rest of the industrialized world--unless you are African American in the United States. Then it is 12 years, more than a decade.

And that is why this budget is so astonishing and so amazing. And I agree with my colleague from Georgia that every budget is a moral document. This document is an immoral document. This budget is an immoral budget. You would think that we lived in the poorest country in the world, not the richest country in the world, if you saw this budget.

There is no way that any mayor in Georgia or any mayor in Colorado, whatever party they are in, Democrat or Republican, would put a budget like this in front of their people. There is no way they would come to them and say: We are going to make life even harder for people who are even hanging on by their fingernails just to get the healthcare they get because, as my colleague from Georgia said, we are all sicker if kids don't get inoculated. We are all sicker if this country of ours doesn't have people that have primary care. It just gets more expensive if families have to go to the emergency room to get care for their children because they have no other way to get healthcare. That is what is going to happen.

Most of the people who are on Medicaid are children and senior citizens. That is who is on Medicaid--and disabled people and people who have spent their entire lifetime--they have spent their entire lifetimes working, and now they have spent their lifesavings down just for the privilege of spending the rest of their days in a nursing home, often in rural parts of our country, on Medicaid.

So this budget has these cuts to healthcare. It is a way of saying it. I mean, we call it Medicaid, but it is healthcare for poor children, for poor seniors, for working people, for disabled people, for people that are living in nursing homes that have no other options. It is their healthcare.

If you take this healthcare away, people are just going to get sicker. It is going to cost the society more. People are going to fill up these emergency rooms. We know that because people will try to get healthcare wherever they can, even if it is the most expensive way of doing it.

We would be a lot better off having a conversation about how to cover everybody in a way that costs us as little as it costs in other countries around the world.

But not only are we not having that discussion with this budget, we are having a discussion about a budget that cuts taxes and blows this massive hole in the deficit, no matter how much the healthcare cuts are, of about $4.6 trillion. And that is to extend the tax cuts that Donald Trump came here and passed in 2017.

This is another shocking part of this budget. You know, we have very significant problems in our economy.

This country relied, when I was growing up, on the idea that if you worked hard, you could get ahead; if you worked hard and your kids worked hard, they could live a better life than the life you lived. That was the American promise. That was the American promise.

Today, for the first time in American history, half the people that are 30 years old are going to make less money than their parents. Think about that. Half the people that are 30 years old in the country today are going to make less money than their parents did. If you look at young men in the United States of America, they are earning 40 percent less income today than they earned in 1976.

We tell ourselves that we are the land of opportunity. We need to be the land of opportunity, but we are seeing our economic mobility slide behind competition, from Southeast Asia to Europe. There is a lot of discussion these days about what the threats to our democracy are or the fact that our democracy is threatened. I don't think there is a greater threat to our democracy than the lack of economic mobility we have, than the fact that too many families in Colorado and across this country feel like their kids are not going to live a life as good as the life they live. In Colorado, there is not a county anymore where people feel like their lives are going to be better, where their kids' lives are going to be better than theirs.

When you lose that sense of opportunity, when you lose that sense that if you work hard, you are going to get ahead, that is a danger to democracy because, inevitably, somebody shows up, as President Trump did, and says: I alone can fix it. You don't need a democracy. You don't need the rule of law. You don't need this exercise in self- government. I can fix it. You should expect your private sector and your public sector to be hopelessly corrupt, hopelessly bankrupt.

That is a dark vision, but that is the dark vision that he was elected on twice.

I think we would be a lot better off trying to figure out how to create an economy that, when it grows, it grows for everybody, not just the people at the very top; and an economy that, when people work hard, they feel like they know they will be able to propel their kids forward. It was an economy that reestablished the American dream for this entire country. We better do that. We better do that if we are going to have any hope of saving this democracy.

But here comes a budget where a massive hole is being blown into the deficit and is causing a proposal to cut healthcare for the poorest people in the country and the poorest children in the country--here is what it is doing. It is cutting taxes for the wealthiest people in America. Fifty percent of the benefit of this tax bill will go to the top 5 percent of Americans. Fifty percent of the benefit of this tax bill will go to the top 5 percent of Americans.

I have said it on the floor before. I am not going to dwell on it again. This is analogous. It is the same if a mayor in Denver or Grand Junction or Limon or Durango or Springfield came to see the citizens of those communities and said: I am going to borrow more money than we have ever borrowed before.

You ask them: What are you going to spend it on? I am worried about that. What are you going to spend that money on? Parks? Public safety? On the mental health challenges that I described earlier? On our infrastructure? Our roads? Our bridges? Our schools?

And the answer is: No, no, no.

Well, what are you going to spend it on?

We are going to give tax breaks to the two wealthiest neighborhoods in town and let it trickle down to everybody else.

That is the Trump tax policy. That was the Trump tax policy in 2017, and it is the Trump tax policy this year.

It is very unusual, by the way, to have a President who has been here twice with an interruption, but that is the case with President Trump. We now know the facts of the math that he claimed the last time.

He said last time that the tax cuts would pay for themselves. We know that they cost the country $4 trillion; that the sons and daughters of teachers and firefighters and police officers all over this country who are not going to benefit in a material way from the tax cuts are going to have to pay back the debt that is incurred to give them to people who, as the Senator from Georgia said, aren't even asking, really. Many of them know we are in this situation where we have the worst income inequality that we have had since the 1920s and that we should be thinking about how to build that middle class again, give people the chance to get into the middle class, which is what we should be focused on.

So there is a set of priorities here that somehow makes sense when it gets to Washington, DC, but surely doesn't make sense in the towns and cities of this country. There is a choice that would never be made--a choice to hurt the people that now are going to have to go without healthcare; a choice to blow a massive hole in the deficit--not to invest in the country but to cut taxes for the wealthiest people.

Why don't we have a tax cut for working people? Why don't we have a tax cut for the middle class? Why don't we expand the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit for working people here?

Mr. President, I am going to finish. I do want to read some letters that have been written to me from people in Colorado who are deeply concerned about these cuts to Medicaid.

I want to also say a word of thank-you to the people that have come to my townhalls--sometimes with their children, sometimes with their children with disabilities--to advocate on behalf of their children, to advocate on behalf of children all over our State and all over the country whose lifeline is this healthcare program that is being cut in this budget.

There were so many people that wrote in. The No. 1 issue--when we have these townhalls, we write down the questions that are asked. The No. 1 issue is Medicaid because the people that have loved ones who are on the program know it is going to be cut, know that they have nowhere else to turn. That is why they are there at 8 o'clock or 9 o'clock at night with their children when their children should be home in bed, because they want people here to understand what it is going to mean to their families if these cuts go into place.

The first letter is from Barbara of Greenwood Village:

We are 86 year old parents of our 53 year old, nonverbal autistic son who we had become physically unable to care for him in our home anywhere. We were able to place him in a host home May 29, 2024, where he is being provided a safe and caring environment. He requires 24/7 supervision, to be given his needed daily medication, and seeing that he gets to all needed doctors and dental appointments and continues to do so. Without continuing Medicaid's current level of support, we are terrified that these needs may not continue to be met! As aging parents--

Eighty-six-year-old parents--

--we are greatly concerned about these proposed huge cuts to Medicaid . . . It's so important for us to know that all these supports will still be in place after we are gone and unable to advocate for him. Please help us to do this by not cutting Medicaid benefits!!!

The next letter is from Michell in Thornton:

I am writing to urge you to protect and strengthen Medicaid for individuals with disabilities. My daughter, who was adopted at age 10, is now 21 but has the cognitive level of a five-year-old. She has Fragile X Syndrome, ADHD, PTSD, anxiety, and possible fetal alcohol syndrome. She requires constant supervision, behavioral support, and medical care beyond what private insurance covers. Medicaid is essential for her survival and quality of life. It provides funding for adult programs that give her purpose, medical equipment, and living assistance--expenses that most families simply cannot afford.

No family could afford.

Without Medicaid, she and many others like her would be left without critical care, increasing the risk of institutionalization or homelessness.

Medicaid also plays a vital role in adoption. Many children with disabilities, like my daughter, find forever families because Medicaid provides the financial support needed to care for them. Without it, fewer families would be able to adopt, leaving more children to age out of the system without the care they desperately need.

Please support Medicaid funding and policies that ensure individuals with disabilities receive the care and dignity they deserve. Thank you for your time and dedication to this critical issue.

The care I say that all of us deserve.

Erica from Johnstown:

My son has Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. His care alone without Medicaid waivers will cost us at least $1 million per year. Medicaid allows me to be paid to take care of my child and not rely on nursing care. Medicaid has really helped him get the best care possible without having to worry about the cost.

And to be able to have his parent there to take care of him.

Samuel from Denver:

My name is Samuel. I moved to Denver with my wife Cynthia and our son Joaquin just over a year ago--

Welcome-- in order to have his complex medical issues treated at Children's Hospital of Colorado. Medicaid has without exaggeration saved our lives; my wife is paid as our son's caregiver when she would otherwise be unable to work.

Joaquin has received services ranging from medications that prevent constant pain to (before our move) air ambulance flights from Albuquerque to CHCO, including several life- saving surgeries.

Losing funding for Medicaid directly translates to unnecessary suffering and even loss of life for Joaquin and countless children like him. Please do not allow that to happen.

Mr. President, I can't tell you the number of parents I have met who have spent 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in care of their own children but who are able to do it because of the small payment that is made by Medicaid. What are these parents supposed to do if this is cut? How are we going to meet the moral obligation of this country to our children with this cut?

A letter from Brittny in Denver:

My son has autism, a developmental disability, and a speech delay. He cannot be in a typical daycare or even go to preschool due to the high level of support he requires. Medicaid pays for his speech therapy and occupational therapy. After just 6 months of ABA therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy, Jackson is now speaking. He's not as aggressive and is getting better with managing the sensory issues that he struggles with daily.

Without Medicaid, we would not be able to pay for our home or food as I am his paid caregiver through Medicaid. I cannot work a typical job. It is important that he receives these therapies and supports for Medicaid as well as me so that our family can survive and he has the brightest future possible. If anything is taken away from him or us, it will be detrimental. Please give my son and our small family a fighting chance. Thank you.

Barbara from Greenwood Village:

Our son Derek is autistic and nonverbal. His dad and I are 86 plus, and it became hard for us to take care of him. We wanted to be sure he would be in a safe and secure situation and happy there. On May 29 of this year, we were able to find a host home for him to live in. He is doing well there.

He has people that take him out in the community 6 days a week to enjoy being out and about, which is so very important to his happiness and well-being. We pray that Medicaid will continue to support him in continuing this new way of life for him.

Our community of people with disabilities desperately need help!

Sasha from Fountain:

I have a 9-year-old, wheelchair-bound daughter with cerebral palsy. She depends on me 100 percent. She depends on me 24/7, morning, day, and night.

I change her, dress her, get her out of bed, feed her, bathe her, drive her to therapy and other appointments, exercise, massage, and physical therapy at home, give her her medications, get her ready for bed, and help her in the middle of the night if she wakes up. Because she depends on me, I'm unable to get a job outside of the [house, and that] is why I depend on this waiver. I would rather care for my daughter, give her the quality care and love she deserves, than hire a stranger and depend on them to take care of my child. Without the waiver, I wouldn't be able to afford to stay home and make sure she is safe and happy. Thanks to the waiver, she [has] the therapy she needs.

It's a crisis, and we need Congress to ensure that everyone has access to home- and community-based services right now.

It is a crisis. It is a crisis. It is a crisis in the richest country in the world. Now we are going to provoke this crisis. We are going to make it even worse. We are going to destabilize these families. For what--so we can give tax cuts to the wealthiest people in America? Why don't you just not do that part of the bill? Why don't you just not do that part of the bill?

This economy has shoveled benefits for 50 years on the wealthiest people in our country. Do we want to compound that unfairness with a set of tax policies like the ones that are being pursued here and turn around and cut healthcare for the most vulnerable people in America?

If you are concerned about waste, fraud, and abuse, go after waste, fraud, and abuse, but don't make people's lives even more painful. Don't make people's lives even more difficult. Don't force parents to actually leave their households when there is no one else to take care of their children.

No one would make these choices in one of our communities at home. I would like to hear a city council meeting where these were the choices that were being made: Cut electric for the poorest people in the country. Borrow as much money as we have ever borrowed. Give the benefit to the two wealthiest neighborhoods in town. It doesn't make any sense.

Here is a letter from Bryce in Denver:

When I sustained a cervical spinal cord injury from a shallow water diving accident at age 20, the only thing I was certain of was that my future aspirations and independence were finished. I had plenty of time to think about what I had lost as a quadriplegic during my 45-day stay in the ICU.

But as I began my rehabilitation, I learned about Medicaid and home- and community-based services. By the time I returned home, I had set up home health care services that allowed me to receive the needed care to be independent throughout the day and enabled my parents to continue working.

By the time 1 year had passed after my accident, I was back living on my college's campus and taking a full slate of classes. As I write this, I am a staff attorney at the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition--an organization I dreamed of contributing to professionally when I was a volunteer advocate here over a decade ago. I continue to benefit from daily home health care through a consumer- directed program available through Colorado Medicaid, and can pay for medical appointments and services, physical therapy, and occupational therapy services, which keep me healthy enough to [continuously] contribute to disability rights advocacy across the state and [the] Nation. In no uncertain terms, Medicaid's home- and community-based services has repeatedly opened the door of opportunity for me to live a meaningful, independent life. Without these services, I would be unemployed, living either with my parents or in a nursing facility.

Home- and community-based services represent American values of equal opportunity to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. They represent our societal commitment to providing and promoting those opportunities to all citizens, and these values and commitments--manifested in Medicaid services--are the sole reason that I have been able to overcome quadriplegia and live a purposeful, beautiful life.

My name is Kalyn Rose--

She is from Denver--

--and I was born with a rare condition: osteogenesis imperfecta. My mother lost count of all my broken bones at a young age, but it is certainly over 100 fractures and likely 50-plus surgeries now. Because of my access to Medicaid, I have been able to get life-supporting surgeries, emergency room visits, and wheelchairs that I would not otherwise . . . receive.

Thanks to Medicaid, I live a full life as an artist, educator, mentor, and community advocate based in Denver, CO. I would certainly not be who I am today without lifesaving medical expenses I would never be able to afford myself. I am currently caring for my now-disabled mother, who also relies on Medicaid and support services.

Without Medicaid, I, my family, and millions of others would be left to die. Medicaid is a lifeline for so many of us, and we all deserve access to healthcare in the richest, most powerful country known to humankind.

I couldn't have said that better myself.

Nearly 1.3 million Coloradans like Kalyn rely on Health First Colorado and CHIP to get health coverage. Half a million of them are children. These cuts would affect more than half of Colorado's seniors who rely on Health First Colorado to help pay for nursing homes because they literally can't afford to die anywhere else. From birth to death, our Medicaid Programs are a lifeline for my constituents and for millions of Americans.

My colleague from Georgia started his speech by saying that a budget is a moral document. I could not agree with him more.

I think we should reconsider, in the face of the advocacy that we are hearing, whether these are the best choices we can make, and of course, they are not. In a rational world, we would be figuring out how to get everybody healthcare in this country and do it for less money than these other countries are spending, just as they are doing, and we would be able to use the savings from that to pay down our deficit if we wanted to do that or invest in our military if we wanted to do that or invest in our roads and our bridges if we wanted to do that or in the mental health of our children if we cared to do that. Those are the choices that we should be making tonight.

I want to finish this by thanking again the people who have come to my townhall meetings; to the people who have brought their loved ones, especially their children, to those townhall meetings; to the people who took the time to write, who have not given up on the idea that they can have a voice in this democracy and that the decisions that this place can make can actually align with the priorities that they have.

They are not asking for anything here except the chance to continue to take care of their children, to take care of their parents, to take care of their loved ones, and to be contributing members of our society. We should support their ambitions for themselves. We should support their ambitions for our country. We should find a better way of supporting them, and we should shelve this budget, which is going to do nothing but harm the American people.

I thank the Presiding Officer for his patience. I thank the staff for being here so late tonight even though tonight's lateness is going to be nothing compared to tomorrow night's lateness.

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