May 8, 2019 - Issue: Vol. 165, No. 76 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 1st Session
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EXECUTIVE CALENDAR; Congressional Record Vol. 165, No. 76
(Senate - May 08, 2019)
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[Pages S2723-S2724] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] EXECUTIVE CALENDAR The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the nomination. The legislative clerk read the nomination of Michael H. Park, of New York, to be United States Circuit Judge for the Second Circuit. Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, this week, we know that the Senate is considering the nomination of Michael Park, who has been nominated by the President to serve on the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. I have a number of concerns with Mr. Park's nomination and his record. I will highlight just one that I think is a major concern for many Americans. In 2011, Mr. Park submitted an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion was unconstitutional. That is the argument he made. He claimed that the Medicaid expansion provision coerced States into accepting a ``greatly enlarged Medicaid program.'' I will come back to that later because those words are important. The rationale for this, he asserted, was that these States could not realistically opt out. Obviously, I disagree with his argument, and I disagree with his rationale. Yet I want to talk about the program and, more importantly, the people who will be affected by his point of view on this policy if he is to be successful in his arguments. If he is to be confirmed, I have a real concern about how he will make decisions as a judge as they relate to healthcare, Medicaid expansion, and related topics. So I am not going to go through the legal arguments, but I do want to talk about Medicaid expansion, the importance of it, and the people it helps. Everyone here knows that Medicaid itself has been a program that we have enjoyed the benefits of for more than 50 years. Right now, about 75 million people are covered by Medicaid. Approximately 17 million of those individuals are eligible because of Medicaid expansion. So millions of people got healthcare because of the Medicaid expansion part of the Affordable Care Act. Medicaid itself covers 38 percent of the 1.9 million people younger than age 65 who are battling an opioid addiction. So 38 percent of the 1.9 million people are helped who are in the grip of that addiction. That affects every State, every community, and, increasingly, virtually every family, or at least we all seem to know someone who has been adversely impacted by an opioid addiction or a substance use disorder issue. So 38 percent is almost 4 in 10. So 4 in 10 people who need that help are benefiting from Medicaid itself because of Medicaid expansion. A lot of politicians in Washington tried to convince people, both here and around the country, that Medicaid was about some other person over there, some person that you didn't know, some person that you may not have to be too concerned about, or so the argument went--that Medicaid was not about you or your family. It was about some other person. The implicit message was this: Don't worry about them. They probably don't need it, and you can vote for repeal and everything will be OK for the country. Well, we know now better than ever, probably, in the last 2 years since that debate and the ongoing debate we had starting in 2017 and a debate, frankly, that has been playing out over many years, that Medicaid is not a program for someone else. It is an ``us'' program. Medicaid is about us, about who we are as a country. It tells us a lot about our values--whom we value, for whom we will fight, and whom we stand up for. Medicaid provides coverage--basically, if you wanted to simplify it-- for three groups of Americans: seniors, kids, and people with disabilities. In my home State of Pennsylvania, Medicaid could be simplified this way. It is an oversimplification, but it is a good way to describe it in numerical terms. Medicaid is a 40, 50, 60 program--40, 50, 60, pretty easy to remember. Forty percent of all the births in Pennsylvania--the national number is actually higher--and roughly 40 percent of all the kids in our State have Medicaid. The 50 is when you look at this through the lens of individuals with disabilities--certainly, for children with disabilities. It is actually 54 percent of children with disabilities in Pennsylvania who get Medicaid. It is a big number, and those families don't want to hear talk of repeal or talk of eliminating Medicaid expansion or talk of in any way undermining Medicaid itself. How about 60? Where does the 60 come in the 40, 50, 60 equation? The 60 are people in nursing homes. So there are a lot of families out there who may not have realized before but certainly after 2017 and 2018 that their loved one--their mom or their dad or their grandparent or relative, or their grandmother or grandfather--was getting into a nursing home in many cases solely--solely--because of the Medicaid Program. They couldn't get there any other way. They couldn't afford it unless you could shell out tens and tens of thousands of dollars a year for long-term care. So Medicaid affects that many people just in Pennsylvania--literally millions in our State. That is just one State. The numbers are very similar across the country. The exact numbers for Medicaid expansion in Pennsylvania exceed 700,000. So after the Affordable Care Act was passed and then implemented after 2010, over the course of several years we gained coverage in Pennsylvania of over 1.1 million people--a big number. Unfortunately, because of the administration's sabotage over the last 2 years, that number has gone down. It is still above 1.1 million, but it is going down. The Medicaid expansion part of that, of course, was over 700,000 people. [[Page S2724]] Now comes the administration's budget--this current budget proposal by the administration, which I predict will be rejected by the Congress. But we have to make sure it gets rejected because one of the proposals in that budget is to cut Medicaid by a trillion and a half-- $1.5 trillion--over 10 years. The other reality here is that the official Republican position on the Affordable Care Act and related issues is that they, the Republican Members of Congress, want to eliminate Medicaid expansion over time-- not just to cut it, not to change it, but to eliminate it. They want to eliminate Medicaid expansion, and, of course, based upon the $1.5 trillion proposed cut, along with other proposals, one after another, they want to cut Medicaid itself. So when Mr. Park uses words like his concern about the Medicaid expansion being greatly enlarged Medicaid programs, or the program itself, overall, I worry what he might do as a judge, not just on Medicaid expansion, but what he might do and decisions he might make based upon Medicaid itself. So my original concerns about his arguments about the Affordable Care Act are now greatly and significantly increased because of what he has said about Medicaid itself, indirectly saying that he is not sure whether Medicaid itself would be worthy of the kind of support that it is going to require over time. So I have real concerns on Medicaid. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maryland.
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