00:00One place where there certainly is nothing bipartisan, at least at the moment, is on the fiscal side.
00:05We now have seen a true impasse in the Congress leading to a government shutdown.
00:11Let me ask you basically what I think a lot of Americans wonder.
00:14What is this about? What are we fighting about?
00:18Fundamentally, we're fighting about the future of American health care.
00:23We're fighting about whether budgets are going to be cut in ways that are going to slash eligibility and ability to get care for millions of Americans.
00:37Some of the Americans who will lose care under the proposals in the president's path are Americans who will lose access to Medicaid benefits.
00:50Others are Americans who will lose access to the exchanges that were set up as part of Obamacare because those exchanges will become much less functional without subsidies.
01:09Look, states are a laboratory for democracy in the United States, and we have different experiences in different states with Medicaid, with eligibility for health care.
01:24And my view and the view of many other economists, for example, Northwestern's Bruce Meyer, who has taken a number of very conservative positions about trends and inequality,
01:40is that the likelihood is that there will be deaths in the 10,000s, perhaps even above 100,000 over time if these measures are passed.
01:55And I, as I've mentioned before on your show, David, have had some direct opportunity to hear about this from my daughters who work at a rural hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire,
02:11who say that we're already starting to see people who have no way of driving themselves lose their rides to the hospital.
02:24People who are staying in the hospital much longer than they need to stay in the hospital because these kinds of cutbacks are making there be no place to which a patient can be discharged.
02:39And that's also denying health care for people who aren't poor, but who need rooms when they have a medical problem in the hospital.
02:52So I think there are very fundamental questions here about the future of American health care.
02:58This is not about some progressive plan to massively expand the availability of health care.
03:07This is about preserving what we have for millions of Americans, and I think it will be very dangerous if this is removed.
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