DENVER -- Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colorado, has dedicated much of her career to health care issues and now she’s fighting to keep the Affordable Care Act from being repealed.
“I think that the Affordable Care Act has given insurance to over 20 million more Americans and its brought the cost of insurance down and it’s given people with pre-existing conditions, or high lifetime costs, hope that they can be insured,” Rep. DeGette told Anne Trujillo on this week’s Politics Unplugged. “It’s really done wonderful things. If you repealed it the Congressional Budget Office believes over 20 million people would lose their insurance and we just can’t go back to that.”
Rep. DeGette says she doesn’t think the ACA is perfect and needs to be fixed, but she says it would be too costly for citizens and the government to take the system apart. And, she says, block grants are not the funding option the country needs.
“A block grant in Washington is just a code name for funding cuts,” DeGette explained. “Republicans say they might want to block grant Medicaid. What that would mean is less money for states. States like Colorado would then have to reach into their state budgets to pay for health care for poor people. While some states -- I’m sure Colorado would do that -- ... the surrounding states might not so many many more low-income people would flood into our state and take advantage of our system.”
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Politics Unplugged airs Sundays at 4:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. on Denver7.
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