Washington, DC\u00a0\u2013 U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) today slammed Vice President JD Vance\u2019s social posts, which egregiously misrepresent Democrats\u2019 push to end the Republican government shutdown and to fix the chaos and destruction Republicans have unleashed on the American health care system:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe lawless Trump administration is using every trick in their propaganda playbook to distract from the fact that health insurance premiums for Rhode Island families are about to more than double, unless there is bipartisan action from Congress.\u00a0 The Vice President knows very well that people who are not in this country legally have NEVER been eligible for federally funded Medicaid, Medicare, or Affordable Care Act tax credits.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a Trump shutdown manufactured to continue Republicans\u2019 strange fetish for taking away Americans\u2019 health care.\u00a0 While Republicans control the presidency and both chambers of Congress, Democrats will use every lever of power we have to end the Republican health care crisis and end their shutdown.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Tuesday night, before the government shut down, Whitehouse\u00a0explained<\/a>\u00a0that Republicans were repeating baseless lies about Democrats shutting down the government to give health care to undocumented immigrants.\u00a0 Vance responded to the Senator on X with a\u00a0bizarre post<\/a>\u00a0erroneously showing a state-funded health care policy in New York.\u00a0 After Whitehouse pointed out the Vice President\u2019s mischaracterization of a\u00a0state-funded\u00a0policy, not federal at all, Vance issued\u00a0another statement<\/a>\u00a0this morning trying to clean up his misleading post by saying that \u201cmoney is fungible.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Undocumented immigrants are prohibited from buying Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplace coverage and receiving ACA tax credits.\u00a0 Undocumented immigrants also cannot receive federally funded Medicaid and Medicare coverage.\u00a0 Nothing in the Republican Beautiful-for-Billionaires Law changes these policies, meaning repeal of the law\u2019s more than $1 trillion in health care cuts makes no changes to this prohibition for undocumented immigrants.\u00a0<\/p>\n In July, President Trump and Congressional Republicans jammed through their Big, Beautiful-for-Billionaires bill, which\u00a0cuts almost a trillion dollars from Medicaid, triggers a half-trillion in Medicare cuts, and raises health insurance costs, all to bankroll tax breaks for billionaires and big corporations.\u00a0 Without bipartisan action to extend the ACA enhanced premium tax credits, health insurance premiums are set to\u00a0more than double<\/a>\u00a0on average next year.\u00a0<\/p>\n The new law also included a hidden cut to Medicare from adding $4.1 trillion to the national debt, automatically triggering\u00a0the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) Act,\u00a0which will impose $536 billion in automatic cuts to Medicare over the next decade.<\/p>\n Whitehouse\u2019s office remains open to help Rhode Islanders navigate the Republican government shutdown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Washington, DC\u00a0\u2013 U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) today slammed Vice President JD Vance\u2019s social posts, which egregiously misrepresent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":202497,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[97,252,253],"class_list":["post-202496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}