00:03Two weeks ago, Republicans passed one of the most unpopular bills in the history of the country.
00:11One of the most unpopular bills in the history of the country.
00:15And now that it's law, we don't have to imagine anymore what might happen.
00:21We know for sure what's going to happen to tens of millions of people all across the country.
00:28I want to focus on five things that are going to happen.
00:31Five things that are going to happen because we no longer have to talk about a House version and a Senate version,
00:36or what the president says he wants, or what someone says they're going to, you know, if I don't get this, I'm going to vote no.
00:41Now we have a law. We have public law, federal law.
00:44First thing that's going to happen, 17 million Americans, including 9 million people on Medicaid,
00:51will lose health care coverage in about 18 months' time.
00:56To keep their coverage, people will have to complete hours and hours of paperwork just to prove that they're working.
01:01That's in spite of the fact that the number of non-disabled adults on Medicaid who don't work is very low, about 8%.
01:09So how do these work requirements actually function?
01:12Well, in Arkansas, which is one of the two states that tried this and then pulled it back because it was a failure,
01:18the reporting portal was only open during the day and closed between the hours of 9pm to 7am.
01:27So let's say you work long hours as a truck driver.
01:30If you're trying to log on at night to fill out your forms, you are out of luck.
01:34Or let's say something unfortunate happens to you.
01:37Let's say you get into a car accident or have a bad case of the flu.
01:41Maybe you're not hospitalized, but you are incapacitated, at least temporarily.
01:46If you miss the reporting window, you might lose the coverage.
01:51And what's preposterous about these Medicaid work requirements is in order to establish that you're either working or seeking work,
01:59you have to fill out a form.
02:00If you get sick and are bedridden and can't fill out the form, they say,
02:04don't worry, there's an exception for a situation like that.
02:08Guess how you apply for the exception?
02:11By filling out another form.
02:13There are only a couple of people on, a couple of million people on Medicaid
02:17who even fit the description of someone who's non-disabled and on Medicaid,
02:22and yet the actual official projections, which is to say,
02:25the way they save the money is they're projecting many, many millions of people
02:31are going to get kicked off of Medicaid even though they're eligible.
02:35And I know I'm a Democrat and I wanted this bill to fail
02:38and I want to tell you why this is a failure of a bill,
02:41but that's literally in their projections.
02:43Without those projections, they don't have enough revenue for the biggest tax cuts
02:47for the wealthiest people in the history of the planet.
02:52Number two, hundreds of rural hospitals and nursing homes will close
02:57without enough funding to continue operating.
03:00More people are going to get sick because of this law,
03:03but we're going to have fewer hospitals and doctors to take care of them.
03:08Why?
03:09Because Medicaid is a big revenue stream for really all hospitals,
03:13but especially rural hospitals.
03:15It can be up to about half of what they call the payer mix.
03:18What is a payer mix?
03:19It's just you might get paid by private insurance, 30%.
03:23You might get paid by Medicaid, 45%.
03:26You might have a little VA, you might have a little private pay, adds up to 100%.
03:30So as you look at your revenue picture, 40, 50, sometimes even more,
03:34percent of that money comes from Medicaid.
03:36If there's a huge $1 trillion nationwide reduction in Medicaid money,
03:41in Medicaid money, that money is reduced money for rural hospitals.
03:46And rural hospitals will definitely close.
03:49Not all of them, but many of them.
03:51So even if you're not on Medicaid, if you live in a place where there's a rural hospital,
03:58and that's the flagship hospital for a small town, that might not be available to you.
04:05You might have to drive two or three hours for care, even emergency care.
04:10Number three, starting next year, tens of millions of people are going to pay
04:15hundreds of dollars a month more for health insurance.
04:18And this one I think we should linger on because now that the fight over Obamacare
04:23is sort of in the rear-view mirror, people just think they get onto the ACA portal,
04:29they sign up for their health care, and they pay what they pay, right?
04:32Like, oh, I want a family plan, I want this level of deductible,
04:35and then it spits out how much you're going to pay every month.
04:38What tens of millions of people don't actually know is those rates on the exchange are subsidized.
04:46And without those subsidies, we're going to go back to the bad old days, pre-Obamacare,
04:52when people would pay absurd amounts of money for their health care insurance,
04:57even if they're employed, even if they do have insurance.
05:00And what is, I think, underrated, both politically and on policy,
05:05is all of those rates get set in the next couple of months.
05:10Because in order to start paying and in order to start enrolling,
05:14you've got to notify people, hey, your thing that was $289 a month,
05:18now it's $789 a month.
05:20And so sometime in the fall, it depends on the state,
05:23October, November, some people in December are going to get a letter saying,
05:29if you want to stay on the same health care plan, here's your new price.
05:33And those new prices are going to be astronomical.
05:36Now, we do have a disagreement between the parties.
05:39I think there are a lot of people who just don't like public subsidy
05:43of health care insurance premiums.
05:45I'm sure the presiding officer has her reservations about that kind of thing.
05:49It is about the size and the scope of government,
05:51but there is a factual aspect to this,
05:54which is, whatever one's governing philosophy is,
05:58whatever one thought about the Affordable Care Act,
06:01the plain fact of the matter is,
06:04people are going to get letters from their insurance carriers
06:07with astronomical increases that they will not be able to pay.
06:13Number four.
06:15Five million people are either going to lose some or all of their nutritional assistance
06:20starting next year.
06:22You know, this trope is like almost as old as I am,
06:30like some lazy person on food stamps,
06:34just like collecting food stamps,
06:36loving that life, going to the store, buying fancy stuff.
06:40It's $6 a day.
06:44The average nutritional assistance amount per person per day is $6.
06:50We have actually, I don't know if you know this,
06:52but we have subsidized food in the United States Senate,
06:54not because the government's paying for it,
06:56but because all the restaurants that operate here don't have to pay lease rent.
07:00So it's a little bit cheaper than you would normally get.
07:02I can't get anything for $6 downstairs in the Dirksen cafeteria,
07:06not that would feed me.
07:08$6 a day is the average amount.
07:10And what the Republicans decided to do is to generate savings,
07:16is to find savings, is to cut nutritional assistance.
07:21Why?
07:22Because they needed to pay for the biggest tax cut in American history
07:30for the wealthiest people and corporations that have ever existed.
07:35It would be one thing if people were getting $75 a day for food.
07:40It would be one thing if they were getting $25 a day for food,
07:43but they're getting $6.
07:45And 5 million people will now have an enormously difficult time
07:52trying to figure out just how to survive the day.
07:55And I mean that quite literally, survive the day.
07:57Find the calories within your $6 or $8 or $12 budget.
08:05Finally, people are going to pay hundreds of dollars more per year on electricity
08:10because this bill throttles the cheapest and most abundant form of energy in wind and solar.
08:17And this is where you've got to stay with me for a moment.
08:23I'm very passionate about climate action.
08:25I think it is a planetary emergency.
08:27I think it is a moral obligation that we take care of our planet
08:31so it can sustain us for generations to come.
08:33But even if you don't care about that,
08:35the only energy that is ready to come online right now is solar energy.
08:44Some wind energy, but mostly solar energy.
08:46Why?
08:47Because nuclear, frankly, takes at least 10 years to permit and cite.
08:50And of course, anytime anyone wants to do any nuclear power generation,
08:54everybody in whatever neighborhood or state or county that is tries to stop it.
08:58And so you don't just have regulatory risk, you have project risk.
09:0210 years is an optimistic scenario.
09:04I'm a big believer in nuclear energy.
09:07But 10 years is the most realistic scenario to get a bunch of nuclear energy online.
09:12Likewise, geothermal, maybe five to eight years in the most optimistic scenario.
09:16Again, I love geothermal energy.
09:18I think it is an untapped resource across the United States of America.
09:22We have about a six-year gap before any of those other technologies are ready.
09:28And so a lot of fossil advocates go, well, why don't we do more gas?
09:34There is a backlog of combined cycle gas turbines.
09:39And that can't just be fixed by saying, I will take more.
09:43Everybody wants more.
09:44There is a backlog.
09:45You cannot get gas generation online in the next five years.
09:51So what does that mean?
09:52It means over the next five years, solar is the stuff that is like instantly pluggable into the grid, super cheap, not terribly controversial except for in this chamber, and ready to power the AI revolution and whatever other load needs we have.
10:09But this bill kind of punitively, kind of ideologically decides, no, we're not for all of the above.
10:17You know that thing we said about whatever is cheap and plentiful and available every time we were trying to prevent clean energy from coming on the grid?
10:24Remember that thing we used to say?
10:26Now really what we meant is we quite hate solar energy particularly.
10:31We hate solar energy.
10:34Again, I think that's preposterous from a planetary standpoint, but even if there were no planetary crisis, this is the energy that is available to us and we are about to face energy shortages.
10:45The reason, for instance, Texas of all places, has not had blackouts and brownouts is because solar can absorb when the sun is high and it is 108 degrees and everybody is pumping their air conditioner.
10:58That also happens to be the point in time, the point of the day, when all the solar farms are running at full capacity and they can power the grid.
11:06And so solar energy isn't something from 17 years ago where you say, you know, sometimes the sun's shining and sometimes it's not and it's intermittent and the batteries aren't there.
11:17All of that is in the rear view mirror.
11:19All the technical issues, not all of them, 90% of the technical issues related to solar energy have been resolved.
11:26And that's the scariest thing for the fossil energy people.
11:29You know why?
11:31Because they can't argue that this isn't economically smarter.
11:34They just have to argue that it's like woke or something.
11:37Like woke electrons.
11:39Who cares where the electrons come from?
11:41If they are cheap and plentiful, we should all be for them.
11:44And so this bill is going to create shortages which will drive up prices and in some places reduce power quality.
11:51What does power quality mean?
11:52It means we're going to have blackouts and brownouts across the country.
11:57So to do any of these things in a bill would be bad.
12:02But to do all of it, all of it, in order to pay for the biggest wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in history is morally and economically bankrupt.
12:15Nobody asked for any of this.
12:17Trump voters were not demanding any of this.
12:20Nobody was asking to lose their health care or not be able to feed their kids or pay more to keep the lights on at home.
12:27But they raced to do it anyway knowing full well how devastating it would be for the country and for their own home states.
12:35One final point.
12:37We are not going to stop talking about this.
12:42We are going to talk about this until it is repealed.
12:46We are going to talk about this when the rates go up for your electricity.
12:49We are going to talk about this when kids are thrown off their nutritional assistance.
12:53We are going to talk about this when rural hospitals close.
12:56We are going to talk about this when your insurance coverage rates go up.
13:01We are not going to stop talking about this.
13:04Because this document, which was enacted into law, is a perfect encapsulation of the difference between the political parties.
13:13My party is flawed, obviously.
13:17My party is flawed.
13:20But I have never seen my party propose a bill that transferred so much money from the poor to the rich.
13:28And I have never seen my party propose a bill that raises the price of electricity, that raises the price of food, and raises the price of health care.
13:38And so, we are going to talk about this today, tomorrow, for the next 18 months, and until this thing is repealed from the federal law books.
