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News you can use
Sen. Jon Tester D-Mont., held a Facebook Live event Tuesday to introduce a recent Senate resolution condemning attempts to overturn the Affordable Care Act and stating what it means for people during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“As we all know, we are in the midst of a global pandemic, a global public health crisis that requires our communities to take steps that prevent the spread of COVID-19,” he said. “Those steps are things like wearing masks, making social distance, staying at home if you can and just ensuring we’re each and everyone of us are doing our part to fight this virus.”
Tuesday, 46 senators joined Tester in sponsoring the resolution.
Last week, he said, President Donald Trump doubled down on his administration’s legal efforts to dismantle the ACA which provides critical health care coverage for millions of Americans, thousands of Montanans.
This is not the time to take the destructive action against health care of the people of this country, he said.
“Now, I’ve said many times before, the ACA is not perfect, but ripping away health care coverage for millions during this pandemic is irresponsible and it’s cruel,” Tester said. “Not to mention the fact that millions of Americans living in rural communities rely on small local hospitals to take care of them, hospitals that rely on funding from the ACA to keep their doors open.”
He added that the people in Washington need to come together in finding solutions on how to make the ACA better, more affordable and more accessible.
The Senate resolution that he is sponsoring says, “We have to make health care more affordable and accessible, not less,” he said.
“I’m going to continue to be fighting relentlessly in Washington, D.C., to ensure that Montanans can keep the health care throughout this pandemic and beyond. This means expanding the ability to receive telehealth care, bolstering our community health care centers and working to strengthen the overall health care access, not limiting,” he said.
He said Montanans deserve a government that works to help keep them safe and he is going to do his part to make that a reality.
If the ACA was wiped out, he said, the exchange 45,000 Montanans bought coverage on would go away as well as any kind of advance tax payment credits theymight have been received.
It would also mean 85,000 Montanans covered through Medicaid expansion would be knocked off of health insurance as well 7,000 people younger than age of 26 people in the state who now can remain on their parents insurance — if the ACA goes away, that option goes away, he added.
He said Montana’s hospitals and community health centers, places that are critical for a rural state like Montana, would lose billions of dollars in funding.
“The resolution that I put up today is so very, very important to get passed because, once again, and I’ll say this many times through this call, that we need to make health care more affordable, not less affordable. We need to make it more accessible, not less accessible, and, by the way that can happen,” Tester said. “It’ll occur if we work together. It will not occur by having a Justice Department going out and saying we need to strike this down with no solutions behind it and that’s exactly what’s going on with the Trump administration right now.”
If the ACA is repealed, he said, that means seniors will have to pay $12 billion more for prescription drugs because the Medicare donut hole would be re-opened.
He said that the donut hole is the gap in coverage that forces some seniors to pay 100 percent of their prescription drug costs that was phased out and eliminated through the ACA — and that would come back.
“The ACA requires insurance companies to cover essential benefits —those essential benefits include prescription drugs, so we repeal the ACA, it takes away that requirement away, leaving insurance companies with the power to pick and choose what drugs they cover, what drugs they don’t cover and so, quite frankly, taking away the ACA would only increase drug costs,” he added.
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