Remember, there are no cuts to Medicaid. Every year in Medicaid, you spend more money than you spent the year before under this plan, but the growth is not as great as it would be if you continued to pay, for instance, 100 percent for single able-bodied adults. Now, there is something wrong with the way that system is put together.
Roy BluntI continue to be a strong believer in the life-saving importance of early detection, and I encourage everyone to be proactive about their preventive screenings.
Roy BluntIf you're a first-responder in Missouri as part of a fire department, you're three times more likely to respond to a drug overdose than you are a fire. So it's a problem. I don't know exactly what the right number is, but certainly I think members of the Senate and House are rightly concerned about it.
Roy BluntIt's a problem that Congress has really taken on in the last couple of years. We tripled the money that was being - to be spent on opioids. Legislation sort of followed that. Then we doubled that tripling. I think, at some point, there's a limit to how many times we can multiply that in a short period of time, but this is a real problem. In Missouri, more people die from drug overdoses than car accidents.
Roy BluntI think one of the lessons we should have learned from what's happened with the current plan is that there is insurance coverage, but there is not really, many times, access to health care. If you have these high deductibles, there is every - there is a disincentive to get the policy, because you would have to pay another - I think the average of deductible policies on the individual market.
Roy BluntMore that members of Senate know about Medicaid, in many ways, the harder it is to make that final decision, because you have got so much information, and you know how many other things are impacted here by one decision here that, five decisions later, has made a big difference in somebody's life.
Roy Blunt