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Pelosi Remarks at Press Conference on Six-Month Anniversary of the Enactment of the GOP Tax Scam for the Rich

June 22, 2018

Contact: Ashley Etienne/Henry Connelly, 202-226-7616

Washington, D.C. – House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi joined House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer, House Democrats and Americans impacted by the GOP tax scam for the rich for a press conference. Six months after it became law, America's small business owners are facing deep uncertainty, working families are seeing their premiums going up and older Americans are facing constant Republican attacks on Medicare. Below are the Leader's remarks:

Leader Pelosi. Thank you very much! Thank you Mr. [Whip Steny] Hoyer, for the clarity of your message, pointing out the lack of fairness of the tax scam, the lack of openness in the process in which they wrote the bill and the lack of delivering on promises to workers, that the Republicans promised and the President promised, but did not deliver.

You have been a champion on deficit reduction, on fiscal responsibility and this tax plan in addition to all the other things that you've said, again, it increases the national debt by two trillion dollars when you include interest on the debt. That's one of the things I want to talk about.

That is to say, because of this dark cloud of increasing the national debt, they have to pay for it some place. So where are they going? In their budget now and in the President's budget, a trillion and a half dollars from Medicaid affecting our seniors, children, our veterans, et cetera. Half a trillion dollars out of Medicare, funds coming out of education, food stamps and the rest but affecting Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security Disability benefits very directly.

Why? To give a tax rate to the high-end. Thank you for pointing out the unfairness of it all, Mr. Hoyer.

In addition to that, I think it's very important to note that the tax scam, when it repealed the individual mandate, it did something devastating. Millions of people could lose their health insurance but over a hundred million people could lose their benefit to a pre-existing condition opportunity.

In the Affordable Care Act, no longer is having pre-existing condition is a barrier to affordable care, to getting insurance. What they're doing now, under this tax bill, gave them the predicate to go to court to sue – Republican Attorneys General from around the country – to sue in court to do away from the benefit of pre-existing conditions. Horrible for 125 million families in our country. Just think of it. Any one of us is just a phone call away from a diagnosis, an accident, a change in our lives, a baby born with a heart defect – a pre-existing condition forever, possibly barred from affordable health care or access to insurance. A family member in an accident, a diagnosis of cancer, all of this is horrible in terms of health but also debilitating in terms of economic security.

Most people who declared bankruptcy before the Affordable Care Act was because of medical expenses. What they did with this tax scam, not only is it very clearly unfair, unwise and, again, not delivering on its promise – it increases the debt so therefore seniors and people with disabilities et cetera pay for it, and now they want to say to 125 to 130 million families , ‘The federal government will no longer defend the law of the land in court, we are going to let the Attorneys General case prevail and, by the way, we join them in saying that this should be overturned.' What a scandal. What a scandal. You have to wonder about it.

And again, when we talk about Medicare and Medicaid, we are largely talking about our seniors, we are talking about pre-existing conditions. A person in the Congress, nobody has done more in the fight for our seniors in terms of Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, the list goes on, including our veterans than Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, whom I am pleased to yield to. And as I do so, let us applaud Mr. Hoyer once again for his leadership for all of this and welcome Congresswoman Schakowsky.

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Issues:Health Care