400,000 Children Lost Insurance Coverage Thanks To Trump’s Policies

The Republican Party’s hatred of the Affordable Care Act began even before the legislation was voted on and continues to this day. But their desire to see the program fail has resulted in the loss of health insurance for 400,000 children in this country in just the last 2 years. People are dying in this country every single day because of a lack of access to care, and Republicans deserve a huge share of the blame for this. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains how this happened.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Just to give you a decent example of how cruel the Republican party truly is here in the United States. I'm going to give you some numbers here. Since 2016 more than 400,000 children in the United States have lost healthcare coverage through Medicaid because of Republican policies, 400,000 children do not have any kind of healthcare coverage because of changes Republicans made to existing laws and standards to get on Medicaid. One of the things Republicans have done state by state wherever they can, is to change who's eligible for Medicaid. Change the requirements for getting in and change how frequently you have to go. Report how much money you're making so they can make sure you're not defrauding the government by saying you're poor, when actually you're living high on the hog. They want to make sure people do that. Oh, and if you don't respond in time to these little letters they send out, they just immediately kick you off and you're no longer eligible for it. You've got to start the process all over again, which can take months, months that some of these children may not have without healthcare coverage. The other thing these Republicans have done at the state level is they have not expanded or accepted the federal funding that the affordable care act grants them to expand Medicaid. And again, as a result from 2016 to 2018 400,000 children in this country lost their healthcare coverage. There is no other word to describe this other than cruel and it's not cruel by accident. You know, it's not like Republicans didn't know this was going to happen. No, this is why they did it. Ever since the affordable care act even became an idea long before it was even voted on, Republicans wanted it dead. They wanted the public to see the whole program as a failure. They watered it down. They tried to make it as weak as possible. Then they all voted against it anyway, but it's still passed because Democrats had the majority, so the law became very weak, but effective in in many areas, including this Medicaid expansion that was great. Millions more people got insurance because of this and the Republicans saw this and they said, dude, we can't let that happen. People are going to get insurance. They're going to think it's a good law. We've got to do something to sabotage it, and that's exactly what they've been doing for years now, 10 years to be exact. For 10 years they have been sabotaging this legislation just to show people that it doesn't work, but had they not been sabotaging it, it actually would have worked out decently enough to get more people coverage instead of kicking 400,000 children off their insurance programs over the last two years, the uninsured rates are higher and rising faster in States that have refused to accept federal funding through the affordable care act to expand Medicaid to low income parents and other adults in low wage jobs. That's directly from this report from the Boston globe and I wanted to read that and I may even read it again in a second because I want people to fully understand what's happening. This isn't because the affordable care act is awful. It's awful because of what Republicans have done to it. And currently we have an administration that's arguing in court to kill it even further, the budget that house Democrats actually just voted with Republicans to

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