“The President has spent one hour on this. How much time has he spent talking about his ballroom?”
In case you missed it, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly spoke with ABC’s Martha Raddatz this weekend to call out President Trump and House Republicans for refusing to fix Americans’ health care premiums as they’re set to spike on November 1st. Kelly shared the story of Brent from Mesa, a substitute teacher whose monthly health care costs are set to triple if Congress doesn’t act, and urged the president to work with Democrats to stop these increases and reopen the government.
Sen. Kelly on ABC’s This Week.
Watch the full interview here. See key excepts below:
On President Trump and Republicans refusing to fix Americans’ health care premiums…
“So, just in less than a week, Americans are going to see their healthcare costs spike dramatically, going up 100, 200, 300 percent. They know that. The president knows that. […] The president says he wants to deal with the costs of people’s health care. So why doesn’t he get in the room with us and make Mike Johnson bring the Republican Congress back? What happened to those folks? They’ve been gone for over six weeks now on this extended summer vacation. He needs to get them back into Washington. Get them in the room. […]
The President has spent one hour on this. How much time has he spent talking about his ballroom? His ballroom – he got all these folks, and they’re going to probably get something out of it, to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on this room that almost every single American taxpayer will never go in that room.”
On how higher health care costs will affect hardworking Americans…
“Let me tell you about an Arizonan, let me tell you a story about a guy named Brent from Mesa. This guy worked in public safety for 34 years. He left that job. Now he’s a substitute teacher. He gets his health care from the Affordable Care Act, from the exchange. He pays $339 a month. That’s going to go up by $900. He’ll be paying over $1,100 a month for him and his wife. He can’t afford it. This guy has an autoimmune disease. He’s got lupus. This isn’t fair to him, and the millions of Americans like him, through no fault of their own, are now facing this huge spike in the cost of their health care.”
