Raising Awareness About Men's Health
Floor Speech
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Ms. McCLELLAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Louisiana for his leadership on Men's Health Month.
Mr. Speaker, I am a nerd. I am a proud nerd. Whenever there is an awareness month, one of the first things I like to do is figure out, is there a theme. It drives my staff crazy. There is a theme, as you have heard, for 2025 for Men's Health Month, and it is very enlightening: Closing the empathy gaps in men's health.
Now, this theme aims to highlight the importance of addressing the unique challenges that face men for their health and encourage them to seek early detection and treatment because the leading causes of death for men in the United States are preventable: heart disease, cancer, and unintentional injuries.
While awareness and funding efforts have successfully addressed numerous health challenges over the years, men's health issues have received significantly less attention and funding despite statistics that show a clear concern. Men die 6 years earlier than women due to preventable health issues.
Prostate cancer and testicular cancer receive far less attention. Even during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, people assume that is only something that women face. Yet, men also get and die from breast cancer.
Suicide rates among men are significantly higher than women, yet the mental health infrastructure fails to acknowledge the interventions that resonate with men. As you heard, the culture for many, many years has told men: You don't need mental health attention. Suck it up.
That is probably true for a lot of health issues, and he would not like to hear me do this, but I am going to use my husband as an example. My husband needed to have spinal fusion surgery. I sat with him in the emergency room as the doctor started ticking through different questions, trying to determine what kind of injury or what happened to lead his spine and the disks in his spine to deteriorate.
The doctor said: Did you ever experience any tingling? He said: Yes, I did. I have experienced tingling in my hand and in my fingers. The doctor asked: How long has that happened? To my shock, my husband said: 3 years.
For 3 years, he felt tingling in his fingers, and yet didn't think maybe I should get that checked out.
He tried to have a tooth extracted without any local anesthesia or novocaine until the pain got so much the doctor said: We need to knock you out. You know when you first come out of anesthesia, you are a little high, and once he came out, I asked him: Well, why did you do that? He said: Because I am a man.
Being a man does not mean you don't take care of yourself. Being a man does not mean you don't seek help when you need it. Being a man does not mean you don't get preventative screenings for early detection of cancer or heart disease, or risk factors leading to heart disease. Being a man means you love yourself enough to take care of yourself.
Now, as policymakers, we have the opportunity to put policies in place that help all people to access healthcare and stay healthy. One of those policies has been Medicaid, and ensuring that more people have health insurance, not just as a safety net when they get sick, but so that they can get the preventative care, the screenings, the regular checkups that will identify early risk factors or worse.
Mr. Speaker, when the Affordable Care Act was passed, we were able to lower the number of uninsured through both Medicaid expansion and the healthcare exchanges.
A majority of the Medicaid expansion population is men, over 50 percent. They are more likely, incidentally, to be White men, about 59 percent. That is compared to the 34 percent of the traditional Medicaid population that are women.
Who are the folks in the Medicaid expansion population? While I have seen our Speaker say in interviews that these are single 29-year-olds sitting at home on their parents' couch playing video games, actually, most of them are working but earn, for an individual, $21,597 a year.
Some of them may work for employers who intentionally schedule their hours at 29 hours rather than the 30 needed to trigger employer-covered insurance. Some of them are self-employed. Some of them are in jobs, like one of my constituents who I spoke to during a press conference after we passed the big, ugly bill, who worked as a contractor, got injured, and could not work anymore but also was trying to get workers' comp and was caught in that process.
I was a State legislator when we expanded Medicaid in Virginia. Part of why we did it was because we recognized that just because you don't have health insurance doesn't mean you don't get sick. Not having health insurance does mean, though, you are less likely to get your preventative screenings, less likely to go to your primary care doctor or even have a primary care doctor, and less likely to get your annual checkups.
What we have seen since expanding Medicaid, as I talk to healthcare providers in Virginia, is that by connecting the expansion population to a medical home, they are getting those screenings. They are getting preventative care. As a result, fewer are showing up in the emergency room sick.
Unlike the traditional Medicaid population, which has very complex medical conditions, the expansion population typically, when you connect them to a medical home, are healthier. That is why I am so concerned about the big, ugly bill that we passed 2 weeks ago. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it will strip 16 million Americans of health insurance and make the issue of disparities in men's health worse.
I will pick on one piece of that bill that hasn't gotten a lot of attention. The bill now requires States to impose copays for the expansion population only of up to $35. Sitting in the Energy and Commerce Committee, I heard the rationale for this was that everybody needs to have skin in the game, and if I pay a copay with my private insurance, then why can't the expansion population pay a copay?
Here is the difference. I have done the math, and someone in the expansion population, an individual, is making $21,597 at most a year. That is about $1,799 a month. In Richmond, the average rent on an apartment is $1,569. The average utility bills are $197. The average grocery bills are $350.
When you are faced with a $35 copay and you make $1,799 a month, over two-thirds of which, if not more, is going to rent, utilities, and grocery bills--I haven't even gotten to transportation costs to get to and from work, and that is just if you are an individual. If you are faced with a $35 copay to get your annual checkup or to get these screenings, you are going to think really carefully about if you have that $35.
What we have seen, and this is why States haven't imposed copays to date, is that you are less likely to get those preventative screenings. You are less likely to get annual checkups. Therefore, these preventative illnesses are caught oftentimes when it is too late.
There are certain illnesses that are deadly but silent killers, and I will close with this. My brother-in-law is one such example, Greg Beckwith. He was a basketball player. He was particularly healthy, but he came from a family that had a history of heart disease and diabetes. He did everything right. He lost weight. He watched his diet. Yet, about a year ago, he woke up one morning feeling nauseous.
Nausea is not usually associated with heart disease. He thought he had food poisoning, so they waited until it got so bad they were like: ``You know what? Something is wrong.'' They went to the emergency room, and he, in fact, had a heart attack.
Part of what we need to do with Men's Health Awareness Month is not just identify the unique factors impacting men's health and the policies that we can put in place to help people get and stay healthy but also ensure that we are educating people on the warning signs of diseases that you might be at risk for.
We know of the agencies that do a lot of that work in the Health and Human Services Department, the CDC is a big one. Yet, the CDC is one of the agencies that have been gutted through DOGE. The workforce was decimated. Health and Human Services has lost over a quarter of its workforce.
Many of those cuts and the funding cuts that have already happened through DOGE--not through Congress, through DOGE--are cutting the very workforce that we need to help identify the risk factors unique to men and the ways to prevent it.
We can't make America healthy again if we are ripping health insurance away from 16 million people and undermining and then gutting our public health workforce.
These are just a couple of the things that have happened. I haven't even touched on the Medicare cuts that are triggered as a result of the pay-as-you-go law.
I said I was closing, but, like a good Baptist preacher, I may have one or two more closings since we have an hour.
We also have to stop legislating and policymaking in silos. This is one of my biggest frustrations as a legislator. I spent 18 years as a State legislator and now here in Congress, and too often, we focus on healthcare policy, environmental policy, and public safety policy, but we ignore that people don't live in silos and that our environment, clean air and clean water, impact public health.
As it is also National Ocean Month, the health of our oceans impacts public health. The stress of crime, gun violence, racism, anti-Semitism, hatred, and division impact our mental and physical health.
We need to start thinking holistically about public health. We need to start thinking holistically about healthcare policy not just being something that the Committee on Energy and Commerce's Subcommittee on Health looks at but that every policy interconnects so that we are looking at, studying, and funding research on how, holistically, we improve health in America.
Mr. Speaker, I have heard time and time again that we don't have a healthcare system. We have a sick care system. We need to get back to the basics of making sure that we are identifying and preventing risk factors that lead to deaths that are preventable for men and for women.
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