Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) warned during a recent interview that the proposed Republican cuts to Medicaid will end up causing “thousands and thousands” of low-income and working-class people’s deaths.
Citing estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, Sanders said more than “13 million Americans are going to lose their health insurance. And then on top of that, what the Republicans are proposing is a $35 co-payment for many Medicaid recipients.”
“If you are making $16,000 a year, you know what? You can’t afford that 35 bucks, you are not going to go to the doctor. One of the outrageous dysfunctionalities of our current health care system is we lose some 70,000 people a year, [who] die because they don’t get to a doctor on time,” the progressive senator said during his Wednesday night appearance on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes.”
“When you throw 13 million people off of health insurance, when you raise co-payments for poor people, it is a death sentence. Thousands and thousands of low-income and working people will die because they simply will not be able to get into a doctor’s office when they need it,” the Vermont lawmaker told host Chris Hayes.
Sanders’s remarks came hours after the House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced legislation that includes steep cuts to Medicaid and health care provisions. The bill is part of the broader effort by Republicans on Capitol Hill to help enact President Trump’s legislative agenda.
The committee passed the bill with a 30-24 vote after a marathon meeting. The legislation is now heading to the House Budget Committee, which will merge it with bills that other committees are working to advance.
The Republican plan would mandate that states place work requirements on 19- to 64-year-old adults without kids, with some exceptions. It would also punish states that pay for Medicaid for those who come into the United States without authorization. The plan also halts collecting taxes on health providers to pay for the Medicaid programs.
Republican lawmakers have said that the drop in the number of people who are insured would mostly impact those who are not in the country legally and have stated that “able-bodied” adults should be working.
GOP legislators have received pushback from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who warned the party that Medicaid cuts are “both morally wrong and politically suicidal.”
“Mr. Trump has promised working-class tax cuts and protection for working-class social insurance, such as Medicaid,” Hawley wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times that was published Monday. “But now a noisy contingent of corporatist Republicans — call it the party’s Wall Street wing — is urging Congress to ignore all that and get back to the old-time religion: corporate giveaways, preferences for capital and deep cuts to social insurance.”
