Watch Senator Rosen’s floor speech HERE.
WASHINGTON, DC – Today, U.S. Senator Jacky Rosen forced a vote to keep the U.S. Senate in session to work through the weekend to reopen the government and extend the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) premium tax credits ahead of open enrollment beginning this weekend. Senate Republicans overrode her attempt, voting to go home for the weekend without doing anything to end the shutdown or prevent health care costs from spiking. A recent analysis by the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation showed that health care premiums for hardworking families would more than double if the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) enhanced premium tax credits are not extended this year. In Nevada, nearly 95,000 people directly benefit from these tax credits.
Read the full transcript of Senator Rosen’s remarks below:
This is truly outrageous. After doing absolutely nothing all year to prevent a massive spike in health care costs, Senate Republicans now want to go home for yet another weekend and do nothing, just like the House Republicans have been doing for the past month, while families find out how much their health care costs are going up.
For the next year Senate Republicans are just acting as if it’s business as usual. Well, I’m here to tell you why it’s not business as usual. This Saturday, the day after tomorrow, is November 1st, the beginning of open enrollment for families who buy their health care through the Affordable Care Act marketplace.
Many hardworking families rely on the ACA’s enhanced premium tax credits just to be able to afford their health care policy. But unfortunately they will expire this year, and must be extended to keep health care costs from rising for everyone.
It’s not a handout, not welfare. It’s tax cuts that help lower the cost of health care for families in all of our states, and without these health care costs are going to go up for everyone and many will be priced out of care.
I implore my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to see reason, to understand that this is not a partisan issue. Catastrophic strokes, cancer, heart attacks don’t care if you’re Democrat or Republican. It’s why we need to make sure all of our constituents are able to afford a health care policy.
It’s not unreasonable, but if an appeal to humanity doesn’t work, maybe an appeal to your political instincts will. Six of the 10 states that have the most amount of people receiving the enhanced premium tax credits are states with two Republican senators, including Florida which is at the top of the list, Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Ohio.
So this isn’t just good policy, it’s critical for your own constituents – isn’t that why we were all elected? Not to go have gold plated dinners at the White House to celebrate not taking action on Americans health care.
We were elected to help families, to stand up for them, and make sure that they could thrive and reach the American dream. It’s about damn time we remembered all of that.
So no, we should not act like this is business as usual, we should work to find a path forward that protects health care access, and if that means we need to be here all weekend, so be it
And if you disagree I want you to be on the record, saying you want to go home for the weekend right as families are confronted with higher health care costs.
And so everybody here knows me, I’m usually pretty mild-mannered. I’m willing to work with anyone, and I remain willing to work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to prevent health care costs from going up in the future.
But I’m fed up with the dysfunction in this place. It is going to have real consequences when people lose their health care coverage and I’m done, I’m just done. We need to figure this out, and work in a bipartisan way.
Not next week, but right now. So therefore, while I do not object to the senator’s motion on housekeeping matters for the Senate, I will not provide my consent
to adjourn the Senate today without a vote.
So that members of this chamber can make clear whether or not they are willing to give up one weekend to roll up their sleeves and work together to prevent a massive spike in health care costs. Thank you.
Senator Rosen has repeatedly pushed to reopen the government and extend the ACA premium tax credits. She recently hosted a virtual roundtable with Nevadans who rely on the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced premium tax credits to afford their health coverage. Earlier this year, Senator Rosen helped introduce the Health Care Affordability Act to make the ACA’s enhanced premium tax credits permanent — ensuring that Nevada families can continue to afford coverage. She also traveled up and down the state, meeting with hospital staff to discuss Washington Republicans’ extreme cuts to Medicaid and her legislation to reverse these cuts.
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