At a town hall on Tuesday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) was asked about protecting Medicaid.
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00:00Is anybody interested in rural health care?
00:03Yes, we have none in Cuba.
00:08Who are you quoting that's interested?
00:12So this comes from a fellow named Randy Dillon, who is a senior tax partner at KPMG,
00:18who happened to be the tax preparer for both President Biden and Bob Dole.
00:24This is about rural health care.
00:27Yeah, yes. 21% of islands are on Medicaid.
00:31And our rural hospital in Jefferson County Health Center derives 14% of its patient revenue from Medicaid.
00:40Will you vote for a reconciliation bill that damages the health of islands and makes health care less accessible?
00:4921% of Iowans has roughly 700,000 individuals, 250,000 children in a CHIPS program, and more than 300,000 Iowans receive SNAP benefits.
01:02My conversations with the head of our hospital through a meeting that we had with our representatives,
01:13rural hospitals are closing now under the current funding situation,
01:21with hundreds of billions of dollars leaving these programs that support local hospitals, support 21% of your constituents.
01:35I find that unconscionable, particularly with regards to, Elon Musk was asked, how much savings, quote-unquote, if you can believe him, have you found?
01:47$125 billion.
01:49The sources that I read say that the reduction in staff at the IRS and the knock-on effects of that are likely to cost the Treasury $500 billion of revenue coming in.
02:07So whatever the policy is, if people aren't honest with their tax returns because they know for darn sure they're not going to get audited,
02:16it's incomprehensible to a lot of us.
02:19And one of the reasons, I think, why you're feeling this either quality of anger or strong feelings
02:26is that we feel like much of what's happening simply does not make any logical sense.
02:33And we appreciate what you're doing, everything you can do, but I think we want you to do more.
02:41We want you to stand up more for all of us.
02:51We're going to save Medicare, Medicaid, if there's any doubt about Medicaid, which was the point of his question.
02:59But also, it gives me a chance to say that we'd have a lot less rural health care if I hadn't got adopted 25 years ago,
03:09the critical access hospital program.
03:11Yeah, okay.