During Tuesday's House Democrats' leadership press briefing, Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-CA) discussed Medicaid funding and the proposed GOP budget resolution.
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00:00On Medicaid, one way Republicans cut spending, cut people off Medicaid is cutting the reimbursement rate to states where state Medicaid programs include non-citizens.
00:12In California, it's not cutting off all non-citizens, but it's capping that.
00:18I wonder if you're in California, one, if you support that, two, if states governing for this bill should be reducing the number of non-citizens,
00:26preparing for what Republicans might do here who are eligible for Medicaid.
00:31I know they're going for SNAP, too, but just on the Medicaid part.
00:33Yeah, let's be very clear. I want the vice chair to speak and actually Dr. Schreier as well.
00:38But let's be very clear. No federal Medicaid dollars are going to provide health care to individuals who are undocumented.
00:46I think you'll accept that, and that is a current fact.
00:49Some states have chosen, some states have said, including Washington and the state of California,
00:54have chosen to provide health care to everyone because, mind you, people will get health care.
01:01We can help choose, and our state leaders have said, we would prefer you have health care than you show up to an emergency room
01:09and provide the most expensive way to provide care through that process.
01:14And so our state leaders have independently made that decision.
01:18Now, through the Trump administration and House Republicans are choosing to penalize those states by reducing their FMAP funding, their health care funding.
01:29What that is going to do is it's going to hurt the entire system, including mostly rural health care in California and Washington and in other states.
01:39Hospitals will close because of that lowered FMAP contribution.
01:44So if that's the ultimate goal of what House Republicans want is they want less access to care, they want people less healthy,
01:51they want people to drive in rural America to drive further for their health care options, then they should be very clear about that.
01:58And maybe they are being clear. By having a 10 p.m. budget hearing, a 27-hour markup, by the way, where health care started at 2 a.m., 3 a.m.,
02:07and having the rules committee start at 1 a.m., it sure seems to me that they don't want to talk about taking health care from people.
02:14So maybe that's the broader point here. The state of California and the legislature will make decisions under their purview, and we wish them well.
02:26We wish them well. They don't consult us when they do these, when they make these decisions.
02:31But I applaud their ability to say, let's try to provide health care in a more efficient way, using state funds to do that,
02:40rather than clog up our emergency rooms that impacts everybody.
02:45Chairman Aguilar is right. None of the federal Medicaid dollars are going to undocumented aliens.
02:51And then looking at Donald Trump's comments to the Republican conference this morning, as reported,
02:57I don't think the president has read the bill. He specifically said, don't F around with Medicaid.
03:03The bulk of their bill messes around with Medicaid. It's going to basically have this massive cut to Medicaid.
03:11So I don't know exactly what the president is thinking. The entire bill, with a lot of it, is just messing around with Medicaid.
03:18So I urge the president to actually read the bill.
03:25I will reiterate these points. Not a single federal tax dollar is spent on Medicaid for people here without documentation.
03:35From a purely pragmatic standpoint, we all just talked about the fact that care is going to be given somewhere.
03:43And if it's given in the emergency room, it's most expensive. We all pay for it.
03:48We pay for it with our economy. We pay for it with a sick population.
03:54And we pay for it when those emergency rooms or labor and delivery or the hospitals themselves close.
04:01There's a pragmatic answer.
04:03Thank you. Have a good day.
04:07Have a good day.