Sen. Blackburn on $1.9T COVID package heading to House without GOP support
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., argues only 9 percent of the Senate's $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package 'had anything to do with COVID,' saying the bill is 'not fair to people who are truly hurting' during the pandemic.
For politicians looking to defraud the American people, no scenario proves more accommodating than a marathon series of votes. Rather than focus on real, targeted relief for Americans who need it most, Senate Democrats chose to ram through legislation that, once signed into law, will initiate one of the largest and most partisan transfers of wealth in the history of the United States Congress.
The House version of the "American Rescue Plan Act of 2021" is a $1.9 trillion blue state payday marketed as the desperately-needed COVID relief package Democrats have been teasing since Inauguration Day. The Senate’s amended "Schumer substitute" is just as bad.
This hyper-partisan bill and the process through which it’s being passed represents everything that's wrong with Washington. And unfortunately, Tennessee and other fiscally conservative states are on the losing end of the deal.
Their scheme trickles out a paltry 9% of its total price tag for vaccine distribution, expanded testing, and health care jobs, and dedicates billions to earmarks and line items that will overwhelmingly benefit Democrat-run states at the expense of Republican-led ones.
BIDEN HAS GONE 48 DAYS AS PRESIDENT WITHOUT FORMAL NEWS CONFERENCE
Even the formula the drafters used to allocate funding doubles down on bias. Previous COVID relief was distributed to states based on population, which ensured a level playing field.
For purely partisan reasons, this bill uses unemployment numbers to determine final state payouts and rewards failing blue states with the tax dollars of red states whose jobless rates didn’t spike as dramatically. Under this new formula, our home state of Tennessee will lose $164 million dollars; meanwhile, New York, New Jersey, and California will walk away with a combined gain of almost $9 billion.
In Tennessee, we’ve worked to protect both lives and livelihoods throughout the pandemic, and it’s paid off. We invested previous federal COVID relief dollars into our unemployment trust fund. We lifted statewide restrictions early to help businesses reopen, get people back to work, and return kids to their classrooms.
As a result, Tennessee’s unemployment rate continues to steadily decline, and we’re one of only seven states in the country to have positive economic growth amid the pandemic.
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The Democrats’ blatant transfer of wealth would be bad enough, were it not for the cruel irony carefully concealed in Section 9831 of the Schumer substitute: an earmark that provides a handout to wealthy hospitals in blue states.
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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) uses a complicated metric called the "Area Wage Index" (AWI) to determine reimbursement levels for hospitals serving Medicare patients: the higher the AWI, the bigger the reimbursement. Because CMS calculates AWI based on wages earned by all residents in a set geographic area, use of this metric led to appalling inequities in reimbursements for identical treatment and sent rural hospitals into a budget freefall.
Fortunately, in 2019 the Trump administration threw rural hospitals a lifeline via a new rule that increased the AWI for America’s poorest hospitals and created a "rural floor." The change helped keep some rural hospitals afloat and preserved access to care.
In the middle of the night this past Friday, Senate Democrats ignored geographic inequities in the AWI metric and pushed through an Obamacare earmark that transferred $625 million in taxpayer dollars to three deep blue states: Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Delaware.
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Rather than target aid to rural hospitals that are struggling to stay afloat, Democrats are giving handouts to wealthy elites and cash-flush urban hospitals.
Is this what "relief" looks like to Democrats? Picking blue winners and red losers is hardly uniting America.
Republican Bill Lee is the 50th governor of Tennessee.