Rep. Beyer issued the following statement today in response to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s score of Trumpcare’s long term effects on the US health care system:

“The nonpartisan CBO says in clear terms that 217 Republicans voted to end the guarantee of protections for Americans with preexisting conditions when they passed Trumpcare last month.

The CBO score says that those 217 Republicans voted to send the individual market into a death spiral in much of the country. They voted to drive 23 million Americans off of health insurance coverage. They voted to end the ban on annual and lifetime insurance caps. They voted to force many Americans to pay more while most receive less health care coverage. They voted to drive up out-of-pocket costs for ‘maternity care, mental health, and substance abuse service,’ by thousands of dollars per year for many Americans.

The CBO score said all of the above, but perhaps just as importantly, it also said that individual markets are stable under current law except to the extent to which they are actively sabotaged by the exact moves which the Trump Administration has publicly proposed.

The Senate should not only reject Trumpcare as passed, they should reject its basic premise of decreasing coverage for millions of Americans by slashing Medicaid in order to cut taxes for the wealthy.

If Republicans are willing to set aside their years-long quest to score political points at the expense of the Affordable Care Act, there is much we could do through bipartisan action to improve the American health care system.”