Washington, DC – Congressman Brett Guthrie (KY-02) participated in a press conference Saturday, March 20, 2010, with his Freshman Republican colleagues to discuss the Majority’s health care bill.
During the press conference, Congressman Guthrie, a former state senator who worked on Kentucky’s budget, discussed the millions in unfunded Medicaid mandates included in the health care bill that would be sent to Kentucky.
“I always talk about this process as - it looks like they're trying to put a puzzle together and they're trying to do anything they can to make the pieces fit, but in the end it doesn’t tell a picture. There is not a story at the end of the picture and we will worry about it later.
“And one of the pieces that they are trying to make fit, so this fits under their trillion dollar scoring as we say is misleading, is what they are doing to states.
“Today, on Saturday, as we are here today, my former colleagues in the state senate in Kentucky are meeting and trying to put together a budget bill. Trying to close a billion dollar budget gap and trying to do it and preserve the momentum we have had in education reform and trying to make college more affordable. They are working tirelessly to make try to that happen.
“And what does this bill do, it puts 30 billion dollars by CBO estimates onto our states. As we have seen Governor Schwarzenegger has been here, after initially talking in support of health care reform, about what it is going to do to his state - my friend Duncan Hunter’s state in California.
“Phil Bredesen - a very well respected Democratic Governor of Tennessee, I am on the border and I get a lot of the media; people know him, they respect him, he made his career in health care - says this is the mother of all unfunded mandates.
“Just to the north of me in Indiana, Governor Mitch Daniels said a half-a-million more Hoosiers will be on Medicaid, costing the state billions of dollars.
“It is going to cost my state, according to Heritage Foundation, 303 million dollars beginning in 2014 to 2019. And we do a biannual budget in Kentucky, so as my former colleagues are sitting there today, hoping to piece together a budget, hoping that the economy will turn around so when they meet again they will be able to do the things like making college more affordable, their going to begin facing having to address this 303 million dollar mandate that has been put upon them.
“So as they are sitting there getting though this budget saying next year maybe there will be a light at the end of the tunnel. Well, if we vote for this bill tomorrow, the light at the end of the tunnel will be a $303 million dollar freight train going right next to them. It will affect college affordability in Kentucky; it will affect schools in Kentucky. So this just isn’t about health care. It’s about what it is going to do to all the other policies.”
To watch a video of the congressman’s remarks, please visit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_ybwPRjJAg
