WASHINGTON – At the weekly Republican leadership press conference today, U.S. Senator Roy Blunt (Mo.) outlined how Democrats’ student loan handout and tax-and-spend spree will substantially add to the cost of Obamacare. As Blunt noted, Democrats recently passed partisan legislation that spends billions to subsidize Obamacare coverage for high-income earners. On top of that, President Biden’s student loan handout undermines one of the main revenue sources Democrats claimed would help pay for Obamacare. |
CLICK HERE to Watch Blunt’s Remarks |
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Following Are Blunt’s Remarks:
“Well, our friends on the other side, in the bill that they passed right before we left, the reconciliation bill, decided that the government could do a better job managing the healthcare and pharmaceutical system than people could in a competitive marketplace.
“Just a few years ago, they decided they could do a better job with the healthcare system with the so-called Affordable Care Act, which turned out not to be very affordable at all. One of the ways it was going to be affordable was taking the student loans out of the private sector with a government guarantee. And the government would collect the student loans, and the interest from the student loans would fund Obamacare.
“Well, I said at the time and others did too, this is the beginning of the end of an effective student loan program. Once you put the government in charge of collecting loans, loans will not be collected in the way they have been before, and so they proved that. They also proved, by the way, in the reconciliation bill, that Obamacare is not working in other ways because one of the big hundreds of billions of dollars of spending in that bill was to subsidize people who make up to $400,000, who couldn’t buy affordable insurance under the current Affordable Care Act system.
“As it turned out, the Affordable Care Act wasn’t very affordable at all. And it’s not affordable when the government comes in and eliminates the competitive marketplace, or decides that the competitive marketplace is working so well, that we could run this just as well as the competitive marketplace was, only to find out that a decade later, we decided we’re just going to forgive all the loans because forgiving the loans is easier than collecting the loans.
“And as Senator Thune said, for people who didn’t go to college because they couldn’t afford it, or people who got a certificate that was helpful to them to get a job but no grants or loans were available for those kinds of programs, or people who went right to work, or people who paid their loans off, those are the people who are now responsible for the somewhere between $600 billion and a trillion dollars that has just been transferred from the income side of the government balance sheet to the debt side of the government balance sheet.
“Unbelievably unfair, unbelievably short sighted. If you look at what’s just happened and think people are going to be rushing to pay their student loans off in the future, you’re just not thinking about how people react to this kind of government irresponsibility.” |