Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Monday that he expects Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to “coerce” Senate Republicans into backing the party’s latest healthcare bill with “bailouts and buyouts.”
“My Republican friends are right to have these concerns,” Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor, referring to Sens. Dean Heller R-Nev., and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. “The bill will not lower costs for working families. It will leave the most vulnerable Americans out in the cold, devastate rural areas and set us even further back in combatting the opioid epidemic.”
“This week the Senate will witness a political exercise. The majority leader will attempt to coerce the votes of these senators and any other holdouts by adjusting the dials on the legislation a bit,” Schumer said. “There will be buyouts and bailouts and small tweaks that will be hailed as fixes by the other side, but the truth is Republicans cannot excise the rotten core at center of their healthcare bill, no matter what tweaks they add.”
The comments came just as the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the bill would leave an additional 22 million uninsured compared to Obamacare and reduce the deficit by $321 billion over a 10-year period.
Earlier in the day, Schumer trashed revisions made to the healthcare bill that includes a penalty for an individual not having continuous coverage, calling it the “epitome of mean.”
“Tens of millions of Americans every year experience a gap in healthcare coverage through no fault of their own, whether it be through things like job loss or temporary financial problems,” Schumer said in a statement, much of which he repeated in his floor speech. “The Senate Republicans’ latest version of Trumpcare would pour salt in that wound, locking American families out of health insurance for even longer thanks to this six-month ban provision.”
“It’s the epitome of ‘mean’ to say that those without health insurance for several months have to wait even longer to get it,” he added
