7 hours ago
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Mike Johnson went on the Sunday morning shows and lied about the House-passed budget bill. Johnson lied about Medicaid cuts. The Speaker lied about the Trump economy, and he lied about what the bill would do for the country in terms of growth.
Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) listened to Johnson and then told the country the truth.
Video:
Here is how Bennet described what the House bill would do to healthcare:
I think we're going to make sure the American people understand what's in this bill.
It is completely incoherent. The Republicans can't agree on what they're trying to do with it. And the cuts to Medicaid are going to be devastating to rural America and to rural Colorado. I have spent a ton of time listening to health care providers in red parts of the state that voted for Donald Trump that are not engaged in waste, fraud, and abuse.
They're engaged in trying to deliver health care on a shoestring as it is, no O.B. services, no -- none of the things that anybody in the industrialized world expects to have out of their health care system as it is. And now Trump and his allies are going to cut Medicaid.
And it's going to drive a lot of these providers out of business. It's going to make it impossible for people that live a very long way from Denver to be able to get health care for their kids. And I hope we are able to stop it.
But, if we can't, if the 53 Republicans in the Senate insist on ramming it through, the American people are going to know who owns this piece of legislation.
Bennet said about Johnson:
It's not true.
Look, I -- before I was in the Senate, I was a school superintendent. Most of the kids were kids living in poverty. Their parents were working two and three jobs. The issue is not that they weren't working. It's that, even though they were working, they couldn't get their kids out of poverty because our economy hasn't been working well enough for working people and for the middle class.
The same is true in the rural communities that I was just talking about that are being served by those hospitals. I -- and, by the way, it's not just about Medicaid. I had a conversation the other day with -- just last week with a woman who's graduated from Western in Gunnison, Colorado, who said: "I'm going to be off my parents' health insurance in a year. Is it really true that I'm going to have to have two or three jobs just for the privilege of paying for health insurance?"
That is crazy, Jake. And that is the health care system that America has today that Trump is going to make worse. Democrats should be figuring out not just how to stop these cuts, but to give the American people a vision for what a modern health care system that looks like the rest of the industrialized world would look like for the American people, because these decisions that we're going to make really do -- in the end, it's not about the rhetoric of Speaker Johnson.
It's about how it's going to affect people in their daily lives. And I'm sorry to say this bill is going to affect them in a major way. In a negative way.
The House Republican bill makes no sense. It is pile of junk cobbled together to get through the House. It contradicts itself, and has no coherant purpose. It is a big bloated bunch of stuff that was patched up so that the House could say it passed something.
To call this a bad bill would be an understatement.
It is a terrible bill, and the American people need to know exactly what is in it in order to hold every single Republican who votes for it accountable.
What do you think of Sen. Bennet’s comments? Share your thoughts below.
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