Wyden Opposes Trump and Senate Republicans' Big Bad Bill Ahead of the Vote
As Prepared for Delivery
Watch a video of Wyden deliver his remarks here
In just a moment I’ll get into the specifics on this horrifying bill -- all the details on the health care carnage and the clean energy bloodbath Republicans are dragging us toward.
First let’s talk about the state of the Senate -- and our democracy. As of a few hours ago, the rules of the Senate are whatever Republicans feel like when the day begins. It’s democracy-defying, plain and simple.
This bill before the Senate is loaded with fraudulent budget math that hides trillions in handouts to corporations and the rich. It’s a violation of the rules we’ve followed for reconciliation for decades. It’s a violation of the Congressional Budget Act. It’s a violation of common sense.
Republicans decided none of that matters, and they have gone nuclear to advance this bill. Apparently in this chamber, if the Republican chair of the Budget Committee says so, one plus one equals three.
That’s just unsustainable. We will be a sicker, poorer and weaker country if this bill becomes law, and the Republicans have gone nuclear to pass it. But these moves cut both ways, and there’s going to be a lot of cleanup for Democrats to handle down the road.
In all my time in public service, I’ve never seen a more destructive, regressive, common-sense defying bill debated in the United States Senate.
This bill is going to determine the future of health care in America. Millions of Americans will lose their health insurance if Republicans pass this bill. My colleagues seem to be ignoring the fact that rural hospitals are the anchor of life in rural communities. This bill will sever that anchor and set rural health care adrift.
Here’s how flawed the Republican plan is.
The danger they’re causing for rural hospitals is so great, Republicans have had to create a “rural hospital relief fund.”
It’s a band-aid on an amputation.
I can tell you one thing: only in Washington, D.C. would you create a “relief fund” to address a problem you caused. How about you just not cut $1 trillion from Medicaid in the first place?
I wanted to get a sense of what rural America thought of this legislation, so last weekend I held four town halls in three Eastern Oregon counties. It’s as rural as it gets. Trump carried those counties overwhelmingly.
One of them was Malheur County, where Trump received more than 70 percent of the vote. Malheur County also happens to have one of the highest Medicaid enrollment rates in the country. The message I heard was loud and clear: this bill will be a disaster for rural health in Oregon. Health care is the biggest employer in America. If these cuts go through, the healthcare workforce in rural areas of the country will be decimated. Nurses, doctors, and support staff will lose their jobs, and rural economies will suffer.
Many of the Americans that will feel the consequences of this bill are walking an economic tightrope. Many have multiple jobs. Millions more Americans will lose health care benefits like home care and mental health care that already fall short of what Americans expect.
These are overwhelmingly children, people with disabilities, and seniors. All to pay for their tax cuts to billionaires and corporations.
It’s not just cuts, it’s also a whole lot more red tape making it harder for people to get care. At the center of these Medicaid changes is a bunch of bureaucracy designed to entrap people in a never-ending maze of AI chatbots and phone trees that make it impossible for them to get the coverage they need.
And even if you manage to get through all that bureaucratic water torture and sign up for Medicaid, the Republican plan says if you lose your job, you lose your health care.
Why would Congress want to inflict that on more people?
No one wants these cuts, no matter their political persuasion. I’m sure most of us can agree there’s a real debate to be had about how we can make care more affordable and accessible for patients, but this bill achieves none of that.
I’ll turn now to seniors.
Two in three nursing home beds in America are covered by Medicaid.
If Republicans pass this into law, conditions will deteriorate, seniors will be forced out their nursing home, or forced to move in with family members that don’t have the necessary nursing skills to care for their aging parents or grandparents. Nursing homes will be forced to shut their doors as a result of these cuts, during a time when states are in desperate need of more nursing home options, not fewer.
The bill also repeals nursing home safety standards that were just put in place last year. That’s going to mean fewer nurses in nursing homes. You would think that would be a concern to Senate Republicans and the Trump administration.
But when the Finance Committee was considering the nomination of CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, he told me, quote, “I believe we can provide quality of care equivalent to having a nurse in that nursing home using tools and technologies.” He’s gone on to be a big booster of Artificial Intelligence. So I’m deeply troubled about what the Trump Administration has in store for America’s seniors.
That’s on top of the fact that home-based care that most seniors prefer will be one of the first benefits states are forced to cut, because it’s an optional benefit rather than mandatory.
Hundreds of thousands of seniors are going to see a premium increase of about $200 dollars a month.
This bill also applies the worst forms of corporate red tape to the Affordable Care Act. Shorter enrollment periods, more verification forms and more hoops for Americans who just want affordable health care.
And the health care carnage might get even worse after Republicans make amendments. It’s my understanding that Senate Republicans will be offering an amendment that would lower the federal Medicaid match for new enrollees in what’s known as the Medicaid expansion, a marquee piece of the Affordable Care Act that delivered affordable health care to roughly 21 million Americans last year.
If this amendment were adopted, taken together with the other awful policies in this bill, it would amount to repealing the Affordable Care Act and making good on the 15-year Republican crusade to dismantle the law. Millions more working Americans would lose their health insurance, and it would break a promise to the 41 states that have expanded Medicaid - many of them deep red states.
These health care cuts aren’t just going to be felt by Americans with Medicaid and those who buy health insurance on their own. Emergency room wait times are going to skyrocket and premiums are going to spike.
Families will be one lost job or financial calamity from getting tossed onto a safety net that has rips and tears everywhere you look. Many will fall through the cracks.
I’ll also touch briefly on another horrifying provision buried in this bill: the defunding of Planned Parenthood, which is essentially a backdoor, nationwide abortion ban.
This provision will strip clinics of their funding and make it impossible for them to provide life-saving health care. Cancer screenings. STI screenings. Annual exams. All of that will disappear for the people that rely on these clinics for basic care.
The health care cuts are getting a big focus here, but the clean energy bloodbath deserves attention too.
In the middle of the night, Friday into Saturday, this bill that was already a disaster for clean energy got a whole lot worse.
What Republicans have on offer doesn’t just repeal the tax credits I wrote for wind and solar energy. Now we’ve got an actual massacre on our hands. This Republican plan actually TAXES wind and solar. A new tax on the cheapest and easiest ways to get new energy on the grid.
At the same time, somebody tucked into this bill a brand new tax break for coal!
So here we are, it’s the year 2025, and the Senate is about to pass a bill that taxes wind and solar while subsidizing coal. It’s so backward it leaves you slack-jawed.
When you look at this bill, it’s awfully clear that the Republican goal is to destroy our key sources of clean energy.
This is a death sentence for the wind and solar industries in America.
It’s a total abandonment of hundreds of thousands of workers who are about to lose their jobs as a direct result of this bill.
The head of a group called North America’s Building Trades Unions that represents millions of construction workers issued a barn-burner of a statement on the bill yesterday. I’ll read a few select lines from his statement.
He called this Republican plan:
"The biggest job-killing bill in the history of this country…"
"...staggering and unfathomable job loss…"
A threat to “an estimated 1.75 million construction jobs … the equivalent of terminating 1,000 Keystone XL pipelines.”
"...another lifeline and competitive advantage to China in the race for global energy dominance."
"...critical infrastructure projects ... sacrificed at the altar of ideology."
Hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy investments are going to disappear. Not government subsidies or handouts -- private-sector investments. And even worse, this is a guaranteed way to hike utility bills for families and businesses of all sizes, all over the country. I’ve never seen this kind of economic self-sabotage. The demand for energy is booming in America right now. Even the heads of companies involved in fossil fuels are saying we need solar to get more electrons on the grid.
But Republicans apparently aren’t listening, because this plan risks plunging us into an energy crisis. It would be a disaster -- and a total surrender to China on clean energy manufacturing.
It’s clear as a sunny, breezy morning that all the talk from Trump and Republicans about American “energy dominance” was a fraud. Nothing but a hollow campaign slogan.
I’ll close with this. The American people voted for cheaper groceries, utilities and gas.
They didn’t vote to kick 16 million people off their health care so Republicans could give more tax breaks to billionaires and corporations. They didn’t vote for an energy crisis that benefits no one except Big Oil investors.
There is a real cost of living crisis facing American families right now. This body should be focused on finding ways to further lower drug prices, expand access to quality and affordable health care, and bring down the cost of living.
Instead, Republicans are using every ounce of their power to jam through another round of tax breaks for those at the very top on the backs of everybody else.
When Democrats retake power, we will have a serious mess to clean up. But until then, countless Americans will suffer and die as a direct result of losing their health care under this bill.
The American people will not forget that.
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