WASHINGTON — Today, U.S. Senator Tom Udall released the following statement on Senate Republicans’ plan to vote on their last-ditch Graham-Cassidy TrumpCare bill without a full “score" from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The CBO released today an extremely limited score of an outdated version of Graham-Cassidy, and the CBO has said it will not be able to provide coverage loss estimates before Republicans plan to vote on the bill.
“It is beyond irresponsible that Senate Republicans want to force through this last-ditch TrumpCare bill without a real, nonpartisan CBO analysis of the number of New Mexicans and Americans who would lose health insurance if it were enacted. Today’s bare-bones CBO score isn’t even on the latest version of the bill, which was released late last night, which would upend health care for millions – and which Republicans want to vote on in a matter of days.
“While the nonpartisan CBO has not been able to fully weigh in on just how many people would be hurt by Graham-Cassidy, even this very limited score paints a scary picture of TrumpCare. According to the CBO, millions of Americans would lose health coverage under this bill. Other independent analyses tell us that Graham-Cassidy TrumpCare would slash federal health funding for New Mexico by a whopping $5 billion by 2026, and by $60 billion over a 16-year period. Hospitals would be forced to close. The care of the 900,000 New Mexicans who rely on Medicaid would be in danger, thanks to the bill’s massive Medicaid cuts. And just today, S&P Global Ratings found that Graham-Cassidy would cost our nation 580,00 jobs by 2027, and bring us back to the days when insurance companies could charge people with pre-existing conditions more.
“Senate Republicans should abandon their secretive, rushed and completely partisan attempts to undo all of the progress we’ve made under the Affordable Care Act. I’ve said all along that the Affordable Care Act isn’t perfect, but the answer to improving health care is not a radical bill that guts protections for pre-existing conditions and makes massive cuts to Medicaid. Senators from both sides of the aisle need to come together to make sure that every New Mexican and every American has the care they and their families need.”
