Transcript of Pelosi Press Conference Today
Contact: Drew Hammill/Caroline Behringer, 202-226-7616
Washington, D.C. – Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi held her weekly press conference today. Below is a transcript of the press conference.
Leader Pelosi. Good morning, everyone.
I think we could all agree that few people have a more intimate understanding of the stakes of the healthcare debate and people's lives than America's nurses. As Republicans forge ahead with their plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act and Make America Sick Again, it is my privilege to be joined by nurses from across the country who stand on the front lines of America's health care. They're here to share their stories, stories that show exactly what's at stake if Republicans succeed in destroying the Affordable Care Act in America.
It is my honor to welcome Vicki Gonzalez of Miami, Florida, Michael Collins of Las Vegas, Nevada, Cathy Stoddart of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Dian Palmer of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
It is now my pleasure to yield to Vicki Gonzalez from Miami, Florida, and welcome all of our nurses who have joined us today. Thank you all so much. Thank you.
Vicki Gonzalez. Thank you and good morning, Speaker Pelosi.
My name is Vicki Gonzalez, and I am a wound ostomy nurse at Jackson Memorial Hospital, Florida's largest public hospital. My heart is overjoyed when our patients get the care they need. Not too long ago, Jackson Memorial's emergency room was consistently flooded with individuals who lacked healthcare coverage and relied on emergency medicine for primary care. We can't turn them away, but emergency medicine costs five times more than a visit to the doctor's office. Far too often, uninsured individuals can't afford out of pocket charges that can easily exceed a month's rent.
But with more patients covered and more of a safety net, my hospital can invest patient care dollars wisely, more patients have access to care regardless of preexisting conditions. If Congress forges ahead and takes health care away from millions of Floridians, people throughout south Florida will be forced to rely on our emergency room services once again and we will go back to being in the red.
Miami's robust entrepreneur community may not be able to afford whatever Republicans in Congress propose as an alternative. Of course, our taxpayers will shoulder the burden too.
To paint a picture of how critical affordable care is to the Miami Dade community, just this month a Miami Herald story showed that three congressional districts in south Florida have the highest number of people who purchase care on the health exchange in the nation. Clearly, patients need that care. We need Congress to put a real plan in place that ensures hospitals and healthcare professionals can serve our patients and our communities with the quality of care they need and deserve, not less.
And now I'll introduce Michael Collins, registered nurse from Las Vegas.
Michael Collins. Good morning.
Leader Pelosi. Good morning, Mr. Collins.
Michael Collins. Thank you, Speaker Pelosi.
My name is Michael Collins. I'm a registered nurse at University Medical Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. University Medical Center is the only burn care center in the State of Nevada, it has the only Level 1 trauma center in the State of Nevada and provides the only renal transplant center in the State of Nevada, and that's where I work.
Before the Affordable Care Act, our hospital was chronically in debt to the tune of at least $180 million every fiscal year. We are mandated by State law to treat all who come to our doors regardless of their ability to pay. Since the Affordable Care Act, we have been able to provide services and extend our outpatient services because we have turned a profit of over $35 million in the last 2 years.
Now, with the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, more than 371,000 Nevadans stand a chance of losing their healthcare coverage. The leaders of the Republican Party are talking about taking away the Affordable Care Act, but there is no plan in place to replace it. I would like to know how they will keep deductibles and out of pocket costs low enough that our patients can continue to access our coverage in their proposed plan.
Since all of the patients that I work with have preexisting conditions, can my patients count on coverage and not just be thrown to the side? Where will the chronically ill and injured patients that we see go when they are sick and unable to work and Medicaid has been slashed?
Before rushing to rip apart a healthcare delivery system, President Trump, Republican Congress owe us a real plan to make it better. My patients and all of our lives depend on that. Please do not take our healthcare away.
Now my colleague Cathy Stoddart.
Cathy Stoddart. Good morning. Speaker Pelosi, I would like to thank you for working on behalf of millions of our patients.
My name is Cathy Stoddart, and I want to thank you for this opportunity to speak in front of you today and tell you how the Affordable Care Act gives patients, families, including my own, health security and financial peace of mind. I am a staff nurse at Allegheny General Hospital and a quality Lean coach.
The issue of preexisting conditions impacts me not only professionally, but personally. You see, my son was born with a heart defect that required lifesaving cardiac surgery. Our insurance did not cover all that was needed to diagnose and treat him. But not giving him the care he needed was not an option.
We ended up putting his heart catheterizations, echocardiograms and doctor's visits on credit cards. We always paid what we could, but those charges mounted and medical bills mounted, and after years and years of becoming more than we could ever pay in several lifetimes, we had no choice but to file for bankruptcy.
Any mother out there can tell you, we never stop worrying about our children. My son is a college graduate, a registered nurse, and he can afford his own insurance, but like millions of others, he could have it taken away because of his preexisting condition.
As a mom and a nurse, I am very selective about how I spend the very little extra time that I have, but I am making sure that affordable health care is protected and expanded. Making sure that it is protected and expanded is hugely important to me, and I will devote as much time as I have to making sure that those individuals, including my son, have the healthcare coverage that they deserve.
I cannot see a world and an America with our patients being harmed because they have preexisting conditions and are barred from the care that they need. My fellow nurses and I are determined to ensure that no family will ever have to go through the kind of experience that my family had to. Patients deserve access to quality, affordable, safe health care.
I would like to introduce a registered nurse, Dian Palmer, chair of the Nurse Alliance and vice president of SEIU.
Dian.
Dian Palmer. Hi. I am Dian Palmer. Thank you, Speaker Pelosi.
As chair of the Nurse Alliance of SEIU Healthcare, I am here today representing 85,000 nurses who work directly with patients and families in hospitals, community based, and public health settings. Together with our SEIU sisters and brothers, we fought for comprehensive health care for decades, including the expansion of Medicaid that has helped 22 million Americans gain health care, many for the first time.
Now President Trump, his corporate Cabinet, and Republican leaders in Congress want to take away health security for 30 million hard-working women and men and their children and grandparents and send our healthcare system into crisis. I am here to say that nurses will not let that happen. Republicans need to present a real plan that will show how they plan to make quality health care more affordable and to ensure that no one who has care today loses that care.
We nurses will be ready to ask the hard questions needed to make sure any proposal that is offered doesn't take away care that Americans are counting on, doesn't increase healthcare costs for hard-working women and men, doesn't allow corporations to drop coverage for their employees, doesn't raise taxes on the middle class, doesn't risk care for seniors, children, and people with disabilities, and doesn't leave our patients to fend for themselves. Thank you.
Leader Pelosi. I thank our guests for their presentations, the testimony that they have given us. I thank all of the nurses who are here for the service they provide, the leadership that they give us, telling their stories across the country.
When we passed the Affordable Care Act, the nurses across the country were an important part of our pushing open that gate that was a barrier to passing the bill. I thank you for that.
Vicki, thank you for making it clear how much more expensive emergency care will be.
Michael, that every one of your patients has a preexisting condition.
Cathy, talking about her personal story as well as her professional experience with a preexisting condition and the cost and the debilitating impact it can have on a family to have a preexisting condition and not have the health insurance that they should have. Thank you for that, Cathy, and thank you for emphasizing Medicaid, because that is so important to the Affordable Care Act.
People don't understand that Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act are now wedded together. If you overturn and repeal the Affordable Care Act, you have a negative impact on Medicaid at a time when people need it more than ever. Medicaid is not just about helping working moms, lower income working moms and families be able to work and have health care for their families, not only about seniors, 50 percent of the cost of long term care in hospital and facilities is paid for by Medicaid, Medicaid for working families, Medicaid for our seniors, middle class seniors who have paid down their assets, a nursing home's Medicaid is there for them. So everyone is affected by it.
And of course now with the opioid as one example of a crisis in Medicaid, the Governor of Ohio, Governor Kasich, said thank God for Medicaid in fighting – a Republican governor of Ohio. So that is so very, very important as well.
The power of the stories that you have told is multiplied by the statistics and the facts, the facts, the real true facts. Last week – don't take it from me – the facts coming from the Congressional Budget Office, whose Director is appointed by a Republican Speaker, stated that repealing the ACA will double premiums for Americans in the individual market by 2026, would increase the number of uninsured by 18 million people in the first year of enactment, and surge to 32 million people by 2026, the Congressional Budget Office.
And now you mentioned the situation with hospitals. Hospitals will also be devastated, Michael talked about this, by ACA repeal, because they would be left with uncompensated care to the tune of billions of dollars. You know, hospitals are the one entity where you have to provide care if someone comes in even if you are not compensated for it, and the Affordable Care Act addressed that, creating jobs and opportunity in areas.
Someone told me a story yesterday of a hospital that is going to have to close down if the Affordable Care Act [is repealed], if they don't have Medicaid and the uncompensated care part of it. How do you attract business to a region that doesn't have a hospital? When we are talking about the vitality of rural America, you have to have human infrastructure as well as physical infrastructure there.
Hospitals, again, would be devastated because they would be left with the uncompensated care. The resulting job loss with funding cuts would bring economic harm to the communities, and it would increase the deficit.
So narrow access, increased cost, and reduced benefits cut jobs and increase the deficit. Repeal would kill nearly 3 million jobs, not only in health care, but in every sector affected, from construction, to real estate, to retail.
This weekend, perhaps you were there, 10 of my family members marched, it was an East Coast West Coast, some in Washington, with more members of my family in San Francisco into the driving rain, but it did not dampen anyone's spirits. The more it rained, the more vocal we became about vote, volunteer, run. This weekend millions of Americans gathered across the country in an awesome, peaceful show of power in support of women's rights and women's health, among other things.
Last Friday, January 20, we saw the peaceful transfer of power, inaugurating a new President. The next morning, America awakened to a peaceful show of power where women across the country, indeed across the world, turned out in the millions in crowds that dwarfed the Inaugural crowd. In the days after, the President and the Republican Congress launched a major assault on women's access to comprehensive health care not only here in America, but around the world.
On Monday, the Trump administration reinstated the global gag rule that silences even the discussion of women's reproductive choices. Yesterday, House Republicans passed and expanded an even more dangerous version of the Hyde Amendment that would restrict how women with private insurance can spend their private dollars in purchasing health coverage.
So here we are. And then, of course, they have begun their repeal of the Affordable Care Act. And the facts are these about that. Not only is it about the 20 million people who we proudly and take great pride in saying these 20 million more people have access to health care, but 150 million people who get their health coverage in the workplace under the Affordable Care Act, 150 million people in addition to the 20 million, and their families, will no longer be, under the Affordable Care Act, no longer be subjected to lifetime limits or annual limits on their care, no longer be subject to discrimination because of a preexisting medical condition. Their children can stay on their policy until 26 years old. And, back to the March, no longer will being a woman be a preexisting medical condition.
The American people are waking up to the nightmare of what Republicans have planned for the healthcare of women, seniors, and working families. Democrats will stand our ground to defend the Affordable Care Act because we believe, I think we can all attest that we believe that health care in America is a right for everyone, not just for the privileged few.
I thank again the nurses for joining us today and for your leadership in caring for America. The testimony that you bring is intimate, it's personal, it has policy ramifications. You help us make the case, and we are very grateful to you for that. Thank you so much. Thank you all.
You may want to step aside when I have to take questions on some other subjects. But, first, let us again, I thank you for coming.
I would like to confine the questions first to the subject at hand.
Yes, ma'am.
Q: Leader Pelosi, yesterday Senators Cassidy and Collins put out a plan for replacing Obamacare, the Patient Freedom Act 2017, and in that they even say that the States could keep the Obamacare exchanges if they want to. Also Rand Paul has put out a plan to replace Obamacare, and I keep hearing that there is no plan to replace it. Do you stand by that?
Leader Pelosi. Well, in other words, what others have said on the Republican side of the aisle is that – I believe even the chairman of the Health Committee, Chairman Alexander – that they really can't act unless they see something from the President of the United States, his proposal. So while individuals may have some suggestions, we have to see what is their proposal.
What we have set as a standard is that the goals that were set by the Affordable Care Act were to improve quality of care, expand access, and reduce cost. Any proposal that they would present would have to stay on that course, which the Affordable Care Act has been very successful in achieving. Obviously, if they have a good idea, we would like to hear what it is and we would like to work together.
But right now we are fighting the repeal of the Affordable Care Act in the absence of a – one of the plans, you didn't mention, but one of the proposals of the nominee for HHS, Mr. Price, was to give a $3,000 tax credit, is it, and a couple days ago in the Budget Committee, the Urban Institute testified that under his plan America's families would be subjected to a $50,000 deductible; individual, $25,000 deductible.
So there are a lot of things out there. I don't know who is speaking for what. But even the chairman of their committee has said that they want to see something from the President.
Yes, ma'am?
Q: Leader Pelosi, Donald Trump this morning tweeted that he is going to be calling for a major investigation into voter fraud. What is your reaction to that?
Leader Pelosi. You know, there is no evidence to support what the President has said, and I think we made that really clear to him in our conversations with him. But I am very pleased that our colleagues, Mr. Cummings, Mr. Clyburn – and who else?
Staff. Brady.
Leader Pelosi. And Brady, the ranking member on the House Administration Committee, three leaders in the Congress, have sent a letter to all of the attorneys general across the country, any place that votes for the President, including the District of Columbia, and saying, give us the names of anyone that you suspect is guilty of voter fraud.
Because the fact is that it is a non – it is so – let me just say it another way. When Jill Stein was making her case about voter irregularities, wanting to have – during the – following the election, the lawyers for Donald Trump testified that there was no voter fraud to justify her request for a recount, a recount. So that is kind of where that is.
No. For a person who is the newly-elected President of the United States to be so insecure as to declare that he is now the President and he is ensconced in the White House and he is saying, "I won the popular vote and 3 to 5 million Americans voted illegally in our country," to suggest and to undermine the integrity of our voting system is really strange.
But in addition to that, on top of it, he wants to investigate something that can clearly be proven to be false, but he resists any investigation of the Russian disruption of our election and any connection to his campaign.
All we want is the truth for the American people. I, frankly, feel very sad about the President making this claim. I felt sorry for him. I even prayed for him. But then I prayed for the United States of America.
Any other questions? Yes, ma'am?
Q: What is your response to the anticipated executive orders from President Trump on immigration and refugee resettlement?
Leader Pelosi. Well, we haven't seen actually everything that he is going to do. I understand he is going to the Department of Homeland Security today, and we will see some of – we have heard rumors of what he might say, but I have always opposed any policy that excluded people on the basis of their religion.
Many of the refugees coming to the United States from Syria who might be Muslim, which is part of his target, are women and children, and I don't know that that's what the American people really think is our value system. However, some of what he says will have its popular appeal, because immigration was an issue that he fueled the flame in his campaign.
Let's see? Yes? Any of you guys who are on the trail, on the beat? No? Okay.
Yes, ma'am?
Q: Leader Pelosi, are there divisions among Democrats right now between people calling on leadership to work as well as they can with Republicans versus people pushing Democratic leadership to be more liberal, especially after the losses that the party took?
Leader Pelosi. No. No, there is not a division. No. We have said if the Republicans – obviously we pledged to the American people a responsibility to find common ground with the Republicans, as we did with President Bush. Even though we disagreed with him in the war in Iraq and privatizing Social Security and won at the polls opposing him on that, when we came together, absolutely we worked together on many issues.
We stand ready to do that. If they want to have a real infrastructure proposal, not a tax break for wealthy people disguised as an infrastructure proposal, they want to talk about home and family, family and work balance, which they spoke about in the campaign, we look forward to working with them, as I said in the opening day gavel speech as I gave the gavel to Speaker Ryan, and other issues where we might find common ground.
But when we don't find common ground, we will stand our ground. On the Affordable Care Act, we are standing our ground. But there is no division, no.
Yeah. Over here.
Q: On the plan to freeze Federal hiring, do Democrats…
Leader Pelosi. Excuse me?
Q: On President Trump's announcement to freeze Federal hiring, do Democrats have a plan to fight that? And specifically, how does it affect the VA? Because I know that lawmakers have been working on a bipartisan level to staff that agency up.
Leader Pelosi. Yes. The freeze on hiring, which was really unfortunate, because what that is, is to say we don't believe in the government role to meet the needs of the American people. So when they attack the workers, they are attacking what they do, making sure people get their Social Security checks, meeting the needs of our veterans, Medicare, the list goes on and on.
And so when they did this freeze, they said we exempt national security, but that did not include veterans. So right now one of my colleagues has said, in the hospital in his area, veterans hospital, they were hoping to hire three cardiologists, which they cannot do now because there is a freeze on hiring. They can't hire people who give you the scalpel. You know, it is not only the cardiologist, it is the people who assist in providing health care for our veterans, as one example that is wrong.
But it's always been part of their kind of agenda to say we want to reduce the Federal workforce so we can privatize a lot of the services, then we don't have to honor any value of diversity or worker's rights and the rest of that.
So I think that they will see some bipartisan opposition to what they are doing, because many Federal employees work in the districts of Republicans as well as Democrats. But this is an assault on doing our job for the American people, but it is not any surprise.
Yes, ma'am?
Q: Leader Pelosi, back to H.R. 7, what do you say to your Catholic constituents who may be relieved to no longer know that their tax dollars will go to fund abortions?
Leader Pelosi. Let me just say this. I am a Catholic. I had 5 children in 6 years. Anybody have standing on the issue? There has not been taxpayer dollars spent on abortions. You know that. So this is fraudulent, it's fraudulent. And what they're doing is making it more dangerous so that people can't spend their own dollars in the exchanges to have access to reproductive rights. So we will fight that, and my constituents support that.
Q: Leader Pelosi?
Leader Pelosi. Yeah?
Q: Let me ask you, have you talked to Congresswoman Gabbard since she got back from Syria?
Leader Pelosi. No, I haven't. I haven't even seen her.
Q: What kind of message does it send…
Leader Pelosi. I haven't seen her. I don't know. I have no knowledge of the trip. Just, we have been very busy. I haven't seen her, so…
Q: You don't have an opinion on a lawmaker taking a trip like that without even giving you guys a heads up?
Leader Pelosi. I don't know any particulars of it. I don't know the basis of the invitation. I don't know the auspices under which she went. I don't know. And she hasn't reported brought anything to our office as far as I know. So when I know more about it, I'll have something to say about it.
Q: Leader Pelosi, on these gag orders that have been issued to the EPA in terms of it speaking to media, but also the withdrawal of some climate references, taking down the climate change pages on the EPA site, are you aware of these actions that are going on in the administration, and what can Democrats do about it?
Leader Pelosi. Well, what can the American people do about it, you know? We have said and I said in my opening day speech here, if you want to silence our voices for commonsense gun violence prevention, we will fight that. You cannot silence people's voices. And it is a deterioration of intellectual resources to prevent information to flow. That's what has made America great, that we have open, we listen to ideas, we exchange them. And any country that doesn't does so to their own detriment.
So I would hope that the press would be a very important part of calling out how unfair this is to even have information available to the press, because I do believe, although we don't always agree on your coverage, as President Obama said, that the true guardian of our democracy is the freedom of the press that is in the First Amendment. That is the most important freedom, because that says we can speak, people will know truth, truth and freedom. Truth will set us free. And so what they are doing should be just appalling to people if they knew about it, but they shouldn't be doing that.
Q: Do Democrats intend to send a letter to the administration or otherwise…
Leader Pelosi. Well, we'll see what we'll do. I mean, do you think they care about a letter? I think it's more about public sentiment. As Abraham Lincoln said, public sentiment is everything. With it you can do almost everything, without it almost nothing. So it's about public sentiment.
They probably wouldn't even respond to a letter because they don't want information. They don't want information. We were chatting earlier this morning. I was saying that George Bernard Shaw once said that the true sign of a truly intelligent person is that he or she is – he said "he" – is swayed by statistics. And so they seem to be happy to be in a fact free zone, where even their own Republican – and I did ask the President to read the CBO report before we could talk about the Affordable Care Act, so we had it.
We have always had – dealing with President Bush, dealing with the Republicans across the aisle – we've always had sort of a, I don't want to say tradition, but a standard where you agree to a set of facts or some numbers or a baseline, and then you go from there. We respect each other's opinion, we respect the position that some might have, be it more conservative, more progressive. That is the American way. But at least when you try to negotiate you're dealing from a set of facts instead of being in a fact-free zone or whatever they want to call their version of reality.
Q: Yes, Leader Pelosi, along those lines, you have met the President a couple of times, we have seen a few days of the new administration. Do you have any new ideas on how you will confront them? Has your thinking evolved on that at all?
Leader Pelosi. Well, it is interesting because I saw him at the inauguration and we had a chance to chat at the White House coffee or tea, whatever, before we came to the Capitol and talked about how we could find common ground on infrastructure, and I hope that that is the case. Then the invitation for the leadership to come to the White House and bond, I guess, is probably what it was, was welcome because, again, we don't have to agree on everything to agree on some things, right?
But it was really quite startling when the President declared that he won the popular vote because 3 to 5 million people voted illegally in our country, which was not fact based and evidence based. But in addition to that, I had the impression – now, I had the impression that he was saying, Carolyn, that that didn't even include California.
So, again, we have to stipulate to a set of facts. If we're going to talk about infrastructure, if we're going to talk about child care, if we're going to talk about early childhood education, we have to stipulate to the facts.
I did tell him that when President, as I mentioned earlier, when President – we opposed President Bush, but then when we won and he was still President, of course. We worked together on the biggest energy bill in the history of our country. He wanted nuclear, I wanted renewables. We had a big celebration at the signing of the bill.
When we talked about PEPFAR, he wanted PEPFAR, we wanted it large. He is very proud of that, and he should be, he and Mrs. Bush, on their leadership on that, HIV/AIDS drug legislation, in case you don't know what PEPFAR is, globally.
We worked on TARP, which is the hardest vote that I've ever asked our Members to vote on, his proposal. We added things to protect the taxpayer in the legislation. And I really think that the TARP bill is probably what has caused a lot of anger in the public, because it appeared that we bailed out Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. That was not the case, but that's the appearance that it had.
What else did we work with him on? What Barney Franks said was the most liberal bill in terms of the taxes working with the President to – I wanted a stimulus, I wanted infrastructure. He didn't. He said, I will do tax rebates or whatever. I said, we can do that as long as they're refundable to low income people. We had one of the most progressive bills in history and it set a standard for how we go forward for that.
So you can disagree. What could be worse than the Iraq war? You can disagree strongly on one subject – what could be worse than privatizing Social Security? But have agreement on other subjects, and that is what we hope to do with this President. Because we have that responsibility to find that common ground if we can, to stand our ground if we can't, but also to just stipulate to a set of facts as we go forward, because if we don't, there is absolutely no way you can come to an agreement that has legitimacy and is valid for the American people.
Just one more? One more? Who shall it be?
Q: The AP has obtained an executive order, draft executive order, where President Trump is asking for a review of America's methods for interrogating terror suspects and the possible reopening of CIA run black sites, as well as the order would reverse America's commitment to closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Could you speak to that, your reaction?
Leader Pelosi. Well, I think that this would be a step backward, and I am not alone in thinking that, that the path he is going down is wrong. It is not about our values as a country. And don't ask me, just ask John McCain and others. Any reverting to that, again, does not support our values, but also endangers our people who are there, whether it is from a security standpoint in the intelligence community or in the military.
So I just think that it is wrong and I hope that he will rethink it and I hope he will listen to even some Republican leaders on this subject.
The intelligence community, we owe them so much. They risk their lives. As you know, I have been – you may not know – but involved on intelligence since the mid '90s. I am the longest serving person, as a member, but ex officio as well. And while we have some disagreements from time to time, largely springing from the administration and not from the community, I have any chance I get to praise them for their work, and I think this would endanger them and what they are doing, as well as our own military, if we were to say that this is what we think is civilized human behavior.
Thank you all very much. Thank you.
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