Hakeem Jeffries: Republicans Are ‘Obsessed with Ripping Health Care Away from the American People’

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
CAPEHART: “So then, Leader Jeffries, the point you just made is an excellent one. Unfortunately, Speaker Johnson doesn’t seem to be quite there yet in terms of holding a vote on aca benefits. I want to play for you something, he said on Wednesday at the Capitol.”

[Clip starts]

Johnson: “Who are you going to trust? A fixed health care is the Republican Party, because we have volumes of ideas on how to do this, on how to fix it, on how to drive costs down and how to increase access to care and quality of care. And you’re going to see all that vigorous debate. So the answer to your question is, am I going to guarantee a vote on aca unreformed, Covid era subsidies that is just a boondoggle to insurance companies and robs the taxpayer. We’ve got a lot of work to do on that.”

[Clip ends]

CAPEHART: “Leader. Jeffries. Jeffries. Speaker Johnson says that Republicans have a whole lot of a lot of plans and everything to drive down costs. Have you seen any of them or is he selling wolf tickets?”

Jeffries: “He’s definitely selling wolf tickets. And Mike Johnson and the Republicans, particularly the leadership, they continue to bury their heads in the sand. They were on a taxpayer funded vacation for seven plus weeks. Missing in action, absent without official leave, nowhere to be found, uninterested in trying to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits or deal with the Republican health care crisis. That’s devastating people all across the country. We know what their plan is. To the extent that it exists, it’s to destroy the Affordable Care Act. It’s to rip Medicaid away from millions of people. It’s to trigger, you know, closures of hospitals, nursing homes and community based health centers that are closing all across the country as a result of what they’ve done in their one big ugly bill. And, Jonathan, this is the same group of people who have tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act more than 70 different times over the last 15 years. These people are obsessed with ripping health care away from the American people, which is why we’re going to go around them in terms of this discharge petition effort to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits for three years, just like—“