'We Have To Defend Medicaid': Sheldon Whitehouse Makes Impassioned Plea To Save Medicaid

2 days ago

At a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) spoke about the importance of Medicaid.

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Transcript

00:00Senator Whitehouse.

00:02Thanks very much, Chairman.

00:04First of all, let me express my appreciation

00:07to Senator Cantwell for her remarks,

00:09which I thought pretty well summarized where we are

00:13with respect to the looming attack on Medicaid.

00:16I just want to point out that in Rhode Island,

00:1860% of our nursing home folks are funded by Medicaid,

00:25and nursing homes are not in great shape to begin with.

00:28This could be a case not only of people's aunts and grandmothers

00:33losing the funding that keeps them in the nursing home,

00:36but the nursing home not being able to survive financially.

00:4145% of births in Rhode Island at Women and Infants Hospital,

00:45which is a legendarily expert OBGYN hospital,

00:50are funded by Medicaid.

00:52But for a variety of reasons,

00:54women and infants can't afford to have Medicaid stripped away,

00:58and it would put that hospital in financial peril to lose Medicaid.

01:03And then many of us live through the opioid epidemic.

01:08Senator Hassan up in New Hampshire experienced the same sort of thing

01:11that we did in Rhode Island.

01:14And many of the people in Rhode Island and around the country

01:17who are in that brave and noble path to addiction recovery

01:21are supported by Medicaid.

01:23And to undercut them would be cruel as well as stupid.

01:29I have three topics that I've raised with Dr. Oz

01:33that I'd like to get some progress on.

01:36It looks like when CMS, in a massive abundance of stupidity,

01:42turned on one of its best-performing national ACOs

01:45and tried to strip it because of a brief and disputed departure

01:49below the 5,000-patient minimum, that got thrown out by a court.

01:56Shows how weak the CMS case was.

01:59And I hope that CMS doesn't go back for revenge

02:03and leaves things as they are

02:05and lets one of the nation's highest-performing ACOs

02:07continue to be a high-performing ACO.

02:11Rhode Island suffers from a 20-plus percent differential in payments.

02:16Bacchus Hospital is probably 25 minutes from our border in Connecticut.

02:20St. Ann's is probably five minutes from our border in Massachusetts.

02:23Neither of those hospitals provide the high-level services

02:26that Rhode Island Hospital and Women and Infants Hospital

02:29and Hasbro Children's Hospital all on the same campus provide.

02:33And yet they're paid more.

02:35And CMS sits on its hands and couldn't care less

02:37about doing anything about that differential,

02:39even as it erodes the financial security of Rhode Island's health care base.

02:45And last of all, I've been working with CMS

02:48since the first Trump administration,

02:50and it's been Groundhog Day,

02:52with people changing and having to get back to square one,

02:55on trying to let Rhode Island be a model

02:57for a better way to treat families and patients

03:00where the individual's nearing the end of their life.

03:04We do really stupid things to people

03:07because of Medicare rules that don't make any sense in that circumstance

03:12and make even less sense when there's a value-based care model that's in place.

03:17So I hope we can make some real progress on those three things,

03:21and we have to defend Medicaid.

03:23It's just wrong to go after it.

03:25Thank you, Chairman.

'We Have To Defend Medicaid': Sheldon Whitehouse Makes Impassioned Plea To Save Medicaid

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