When more people have insurance, taxpayers pay less and Medicaid saves money, but Senate Republicans are using healthcare reform as "a political exercise," Sen. Debbie Stabenow said Monday.
"What they want to do is take close to $800 billion, as you know, out of the healthcare system that funds seniors in nursing homes, children, families and transfer it into a big tax cut for drug companies, insurance companies, wealthy people," the Michigan Democrat told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program. "They're having difficulty because, as you saw at the governors' conference, the fact is that when you cover more people, you actually save money."
In Michigan alone, she said, there will be about $450 million in taxpayer money saved, because fewer people who can't pay are walking into emergency rooms.
"Ninety-seven percent of our children can now see a doctor," Stabenow said. "What we're seeing is that costs go down for uncompensated care, which means people with private insurance, like you and I, or the taxpayers pay less so Medicaid saves money."
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are using healthcare as a "political exercise," said Stabenow.
"That's what they don't understand," she said. "Health insurance is personal. If my mom has Alzheimer's, we want to make sure she has the nursing home care that she needs. They're doing a political exercise on something that affects every single one of us ... when the public looks at this, they go, wait a minute, wait a minute, this is not about politics. This is about my family."
Stabenow said that now that there is a delay on the bill vote, Americans will start to think worse of the bill.
"Over the weekend we saw Blue Cross/Blue Shield, the insurance industry, come out and say that what they added to the bill, the Cruz amendment doesn't work," said Stabenow. "It basically reinstitutes junk insurance plans. There would be one plan, really expensive, if you wanted to actually get coverage, and if you had preexisting conditions, everything else would be junk."
The plan would also cause smaller hospitals to close, she warned.
"Usually these hospitals are the biggest employer in the community," Stabenow said. "Jobs go away. Doctors go away. Nurses go away. It's stunning to me that my colleagues that represent large rural states wouldn't understand that this is basically the foundation of health care for everybody in their states ... I don't know any group that thinks this is a good idea."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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