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Floor Speech
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Mr. KELLY. Mr. President, we are just a day away from a government shutdown because President Trump and Republicans would rather shut down the government than work with us to keep healthcare premiums from spiking for American families. We are watching the same pattern repeat itself again in Washington: partisan politics and dysfunction hurting hard-working families.
This fight is about healthcare. It is about what happens to families in Arizona if tax credits that reduce their healthcare premiums expire. It is about costs going up for people who are already feeling squeezed by inflation and Trump's tariffs driving up the prices of everything from groceries to back-to-school supplies.
And it is not complicated. If these tax credits expire, working families in my State will see their monthly premiums spike when they go to sign up for a new plan in just a few weeks. I have heard from Arizonans who are now saving hundreds of dollars every month because of these credits. Ending them would be a gut punch. For some, it would mean losing their coverage altogether.
It is pretty simple. We should extend them, and that is what we are proposing. Let's not forget who holds the cards: Donald Trump and my Republican colleagues. They are the ones saying no--not just to Democrats, not just to us, but to families in Arizona and across the country.
But instead of working with us to lower costs and avoid a shutdown, Donald Trump has refused to even sit down and talk about it for weeks until just today, barely 24 hours before the deadline. He would rather watch the country inch closer to a shutdown than to try to figure out solutions.
It is going to be everyday Americans who pay the price, your constituents and mine. In Arizona, more than 379,000 people have reduced premiums through these tax credits. It lowers their premium by an average of about $475 every single month. So if those tax credits are allowed to expire, that means their healthcare premiums for next year go up as much as 55 percent. That is hundreds of dollars every single month.
And that blows a huge hole in the family budget. It means canceled family trips. It means not being able to sign your kid up to a sports league. It means taking on more shifts just to cover this added cost. And for a lot of folks, what this means is they will not be able to afford health insurance at all.
The estimate is that more than 109,000 people in Arizona alone would be unable to afford coverage. In the richest country in the history of the world, there is no reason why somebody who is working full time shouldn't be able to afford basic health insurance. No one should be one accident or one unexpected illness away from financial ruin. No one should be unable to take their kid to a doctor when they get sick.
But here we are because of Donald Trump and Republicans. This would hurt even harder in rural Arizona and small towns--places like Cochise, Apache, Navajo, and Santa Cruz Counties where there are fewer large employers who offer health benefits. But these are counties with higher poverty rates. It will hurt families across Arizona who finally-- finally--got access to care and now they are being told that it may disappear.
It doesn't have to be this way. There is still time to extend the premium tax credits and protect families from higher costs while keeping the Federal Government open and serving Americans.
Mr. President, we can do this. We just have to be willing to sit down and work to figure it out. I know I am.
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