Schatz: Republican Tax Law Will Result In Millions Losing Health Care And Food Assistance, Rural Hospitals Closing

WASHINGTON – Following the enactment of the Republican tax law, U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i) spoke out on the Senate floor last night to underscore the harmful impacts the law will have on millions of people. The new law, passed without any bipartisan support, will soon kick more than 17 million Americans off of health insurance, raise monthly health care costs across the country, and slash nutritional assistance for those in need – all in order to cut taxes for the ultra-wealthy.

“First thing that's going to happen: 17 million Americans, including 9 million people on Medicaid, will lose health care coverage in about 18 months’ time,” said Senator Schatz. “Hundreds of rural hospitals and nursing homes will close without enough funding to continue operating. More people are going to get sick because of this law. But we're going to have fewer hospitals and doctors to take care of them. Why? Because Medicaid is a big revenue stream for really all hospitals, but especially rural hospitals.”

Schatz continued, “We are not going to stop talking about this. We are going to talk about this until it is repealed. We're going to talk about this when the rates go up for your electricity. We're going to talk about this when kids are thrown off their nutritional assistance. We're going to talk about this when rural hospitals close. We are going to talk about this when your insurance coverage rates go up.”

The full text of Schatz’s remarks can be found below. Video is available here. 

Two weeks ago, Republicans passed one of the most unpopular bills in the history of the country. And now that it's law, we don't have to imagine anymore what might happen. We know for sure what's going to happen to tens of millions of people all across the country.

I want to focus on five things that are going to happen. Five things that are going to happen because we no longer have to talk about a House version and the Senate version, or what the president says he wants, or what someone says – you know, “if I don't get this, I'm going to vote no.” Now we have a law. We have public law. Federal law.

First thing that's going to happen 17 million Americans, including 9 million people on Medicaid, will lose health care coverage in about 18 months’ time. To keep their coverage, people will have to complete hours and hours of paperwork just to prove that they're working. That's in spite of the fact that the number of nondisabled adults on Medicaid who don't work is very low, about 8 percent.

So how do these work requirements actually function? Well, in Arkansas, which is one of the two states that tried this and then pulled it back because it was a failure, the reporting portal was only open during the day and closed between the hours of 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. So let's say you work long hours as a truck driver. If you're trying to log on at night to fill out your forms, you are out of luck. Or let's say something unfortunate happens to you. Let's say you get in a car accident or have a bad case of the flu. Maybe you're not hospitalized, but you are incapacitated, at least temporarily. If you miss the reporting window, you might lose the coverage.

And what's preposterous about these Medicaid work requirements is in order to establish that you're either working or seeking work, you have to fill out a form. If you get sick and are bedridden and can't fill out the form, they say, don't worry, there's an exception for a situation like that. Guess how you apply for the exception – by filling out another form.

There are only a couple of people on a couple of million people on Medicaid who even fit the description of someone who is non-disabled and on Medicaid, and yet the actual official projections, which is to say, the way they save the money, is they're projecting many, many millions of people are going to get kicked off of Medicaid, even though they're eligible.

And I know I'm a Democrat, and I wanted this bill to fail. And I want to tell you why this is a failure of a bill, but that's literally in their projections. Without those projections, they don't have enough revenue for the biggest tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the history of the planet.

Number two, hundreds of rural hospitals and nursing homes will close without enough funding to continue operating. More people are going to get sick because of this law. But we're going to have fewer hospitals and doctors to take care of them. Why? Because Medicaid is a big revenue stream for really all hospitals, but especially rural hospitals. It can be up to about half of what they call the payer mix. What is a payer mix? It's just you might get paid by private insurance 30 percent. You might get paid by Medicaid, 45 percent. You might have a little VA. You might have a little private pay adds up to 100 percent. So as you look at your revenue picture, 40, 50, sometimes even more percent of that money comes from Medicaid. If there's a huge $1 trillion nationwide reduction in Medicaid money, that money is reduced money for rural hospitals and rural hospitals will definitely close. Not all of them, but many of them. So even if you're not on Medicaid. If you live in a place where there's a rural hospital and that's the flagship hospital for a small town that might not be available to you, you might have to drive 2 or 3 hours for care or even emergency care.

Number three, starting next year, tens of millions of people are going to pay hundreds of dollars a month more for health insurance. And this is one I think we should linger on, because now that the fight over Obamacare is sort of in the rearview mirror, people just think they get on to the ACA portal, they sign up for their health care, and they pay what they pay. Right? Like, “oh, I want a family plan. I want this level of deductible.” And then it spits out how much you're going to pay every month, what tens of millions of people don't actually know is those rates on the exchange are subsidized. And without those subsidies, we're going to go back to the bad old days pre-Obamacare, when people would pay absurd amounts of money for their health care insurance, even if they're employed, even if they do have insurance.

And what is I think, underrated both politically and on policy, is all of those rates get set in the next couple of months. Because in order to start paying and in order to start enrolling, you got to notify people, “hey, you're thing that was $289 a month, now it's $789 a month.” And so sometime in the fall, it depends on the state, October and November. Some people in December are going to get a letter saying, “if you want to stay on the same health care plan, here's your new price.” And those new prices are going to be astronomical.

Now we do have a disagreement between the parties. I think there are a lot of people who just don't like public subsidy of health care insurance premiums. I'm sure the presiding officer has her reservations about that kind of thing. It is about the size and the scope of government. But there is a factual aspect to this, which is whatever one's governing philosophy is, whatever one thought about the Affordable Care Act, the plain fact of the matter is people are going to get letters from their insurance carriers with astronomical increases that they will not be able to pay.

Number four, 5 million people are either going to lose some or all of their nutritional assistance starting next year. You know, this trope is like almost as old as I am, like some lazy person on food stamps. Just like collecting food stamps. Loving that life, going to the store, buying fancy stuff. It's $6 a day. The average nutritional assistance amount per person per day is six bucks. We have actually, I don't know if you know this, but we have subsidized food in the United States Senate, not because the government is paying for it, but because all the restaurants that operate here don't have to pay lease rent. So it's a little bit cheaper than you would normally get. I can't get anything for six bucks downstairs in the Dirksen cafeteria. Not that would feed me $6 a day is the average amount. And what the Republicans decided to do. Is to generate savings, is to find saving is to cut nutritional assistance. Why? Because they needed to pay for the biggest tax cut in American history for the wealthiest people and corporations that have ever existed.

It would be one thing if people were getting 75 bucks a day for food. It would be one thing if they were getting 25 bucks a day for food, but they're getting six bucks, and 5 million people will now have enormously difficult time trying to figure out just how to survive the day. And I mean, not quite literally, survive the day. Find the calories within your 6 or 8 or $12 budget.

Finally, people are going to pay hundreds of dollars more per year on electricity because this bill throttles the cheapest and most abundant form of energy in wind and solar. And this is where you got to stay with me for a moment. I'm very passionate about climate action. I think it is a planetary emergency. I think it is a moral obligation that we take care of our planet so it can sustain us for generations to come. But even if you don't care about that, the only energy that is ready to come on line right now is solar energy. Some wind energy, but mostly solar energy. Why? Because nuclear, frankly takes at least ten years to permit and site. And of course, anytime anyone wants to do any nuclear power generation, everybody in whatever neighborhood or state or county that is tries to stop it. And so you not you don't just have regulatory risk, you have project risk. Ten years is an optimistic scenario. I'm a big believer in nuclear energy, but ten years is the most realistic scenario to get a bunch of nuclear energy on line.

Likewise, geothermal maybe 5 to 8 years in the most optimistic scenario. Again, I love geothermal energy. I think it is an untapped resource across the United States of America. We have about a six-year gap before any of those other technologies are ready. And so a lot of fossil advocates go, well, why don't we do more gas? There is a backlog of combined cycle gas turbines, and that can't just be fixed by saying I will take more.

Everybody wants more. There is a backlog. You cannot get gas generation online in the next five years. So what does that mean? It means over the next five years, solar is the stuff that is like instantly pluggable into the grid. Super cheap, not terribly controversial except for in this chamber and ready to power the AI revolution or whatever other load needs we have.

But this bill kind of putatively, kind of ideologically decides, “no, we're not for all of the above. You know, that thing we said about whatever's cheap and plentiful and available every time we were trying to prevent clean energy from coming on the grid? Remember that thing we used to say? Now, really what we meant is we quite hate solar energy. Particularly we hate solar energy.”

Again, I think that's preposterous from a planetary standpoint. But even if there were no planetary crisis, this is the energy that is available to us and we are about to face energy shortages. The reason, for instance, Texas of all places, has not had blackouts and brownouts is because solar can't absorb when the sun is high and it is 108 degrees and everybody's pumping their air conditioner. That also happens to be the point in time, the point of the day when all the solar farms are running at full capacity and they can power the grid. And so solar energy isn't something from 17 years ago, when people would say, “you know, sometimes the sun is shining and sometimes it's not, and it's intermittent and the batteries aren't there.” All of that is in the rearview mirror. All the technical issues, not all of them, 90 percent of the technical issues related to solar energy have been resolved. And that's the scariest thing for the fossil energy people. You know why? Because they can't argue that this isn't economically smarter. They just have to argue that it's like woke or something like woke electrons.

Who cares where the electrons come from? If they're cheap and plentiful, we should all be for them. And so this bill is going to create shortages, which will drive up prices. And in some places reduce power quality. What does power quality mean? It means we're going to have blackouts and brownouts across the country. So to do any of these things in a bill would be bad. But to do all of it, all of it, in order to pay for the biggest wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in history, is morally and economically bankrupt.

Nobody asked for any of this. Trump voters were not demanding any of this. Nobody was asking to lose their health care or not be able to feed their kids or pay more to keep the lights on at home, but they raced to do it anyway, knowing full well how devastating it would be for the country and for their own home states.

One final point: we are not going to stop talking about this. We are going to talk about this until it is repealed. We're going to talk about this when the rates go up for your electricity. We're going to talk about this when kids are thrown off their nutritional assistance. We're going to talk about this when rural hospitals close, we are going to talk about this when your insurance coverage rates go up.

We are not going to stop talking about this because this document, which was enacted into law, is a perfect encapsulation of the difference between the political parties. My party is flawed. Obviously, my party is flawed. But I've never seen my party propose a bill that transferred so much money from the poor to the rich, and I've never seen my party propose a bill that raises the price of electricity, that raises the price of food and raises the price of health care.

And so we're going to talk about this today, tomorrow, for the next 18 months. And until this thing is repealed from the federal law books.

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