Scalise: ‘I’m not going to let a dime of our GOMESA money be taken’

"I was actually with Mick Mulvaney yesterday, the President’s Director of Office of Management and Budget who puts the budget together and I just made it real clear to him, you know, I’m not going to let a dime of our GOMESA money be taken, and he recognizes that. He knows it’s not going to pass the House..Look, we fought for this hard because this is the money that allows us to restore our coast. It’s too critical for Louisiana.

"Louisiana for decades never got a dime from the offshore revenue that was generated by all the drilling that’s done off our coast. This finally gives us the ability to share the revenues like every other state. We produce a lot of energy for the country, so we ought to get our fair share like everybody else does of that money.

"It’s going to mean hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and it’s dedicated in Louisiana to coastal restoration. That money will be protected in the House, I surely will not let them take that money, and the President knows that. The President, it’s not going to be a fight with the President. He recognizes it won’t pass the House so we’re going to keep that money to continue restoring our coast."

"In Louisiana last year we paid double in increases, next year we’re projected to pay over 20% more again for healthcare. Plus our deductibles are drastically higher. You look at a lot of states right now, it happened 3 weeks ago in Iowa, it’s happened in Virginia, we just got word a couple days ago in Kansas nobody is writing insurance. BlueCross in Kansas literally just said earlier this week they’re not going to offer policies for anybody in Obamacare because it doesn’t work. So if you have a preexisting condition in many states around the country you’re not going to have any place to go buy insurance, you’re going to have to go to the emergency room—the law doesn’t work.

"Our bill actually lowers premiums, gives people the real freedom to go buy whatever they want, reforms the Medicaid program which is a very broken form of healthcare. It does a lot of good things for families and low-income people to actually give you the ability to buy whatever you want at a lower cost in healthcare."

"[There] is one of those old adages of the way that they do accounting in Washington, or Baton Rouge or anywhere. If currently you’re getting, you know let’s say you’re getting 100 billion dollars and next year you’re going to get 100 billion dollars they call that a cut because they wanted to get 110 billion dollars. Nobody is getting a cut, we just actually slow the growth and control the growth. What states have told us for years is Medicaid…[is] spending money on things you don’t need to do and don’t want to do because...Washington tells you what you have to do and how to run the program in Louisiana.

If Louisiana can run the program on its own, it can do it a lot better. But nobody gets less money, they just don’t get the increases that they were used to getting, which by the way are not sustainable. Our country is going broke, we don’t have a balanced budget, we’re trying to get to a balanced budget and if everybody just keeps printing money and borrowing it from China, your kids and my kids aren’t going to have the American dream that we have today. So we control the growth. Nobody gets cut, but you just don’t get as much additional money as you might’ve. That’s not a cut.

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"We block grant Medicaid to the states, which means each state gets to run the Medicaid program as they see fit. You can’t use your Medicaid money to go build roads, but you can use your Medicaid money in healthcare for low-income people. If you can come up with more innovative ideas, which many states do, usually the federal government tells them they can’t do that because it doesn’t fit the rigid, “one size fits all” model—Washington’s Medicaid program. We change that, we actually let states run their own Medicaid program. Because look, low-income people in Louisiana have a lot different kind of needs than low-income people in California. And yet, right now you really have to run it very similarly. If Louisiana has an innovative idea and they say hey, Medicaid, which is CMS is the program that runs Medicaid in D.C., they have to ask CMS for a waiver and usually they get denied that waiver, meaning [they] can’t do something innovative. We change it and let states be innovative with the existing money they have, not with less money, with the existing money they have."

"We also have a tax credit for families that are low-income. Right now if you get your healthcare…from your company—most, over 60% of Americans get their healthcare from their employer, over 20% of Americans get their healthcare from Medicare—neither of those programs are changed at all in our bill. But for the people that buy health insurance on their own, right now if they’re doing it through Obamacare we get rid of that and give you a tax credit so now you can go buy any kind of policy you want from anybody who offers it, whatever is best for your family. There are a lot of companies who today do not offer Obamacare policies because it doesn’t work. [For example,] you might only have BlueCross in Louisiana to buy your healthcare from. Now there’s going to be multiple companies that will finally come back in and offer plans for families based on what the family wants, not based on what Washington tells you you have to have."

"They’re going to realize, how do you lower premiums, how do you protect people with pre-existing conditions, how do you give people the freedom to buy whatever they want? Those were our guiding principles and that’s ultimately how we came to a majority. It took a few months, it took a lot of time, it took a lot of individual meetings, talking to members, talking to people back home, all of us. I shared a lot of stories I got from my constituents, people with pre-existing conditions for example, who under Obamacare are paying dramatically more and their plan doesn’t even work for them. So all of that’s going to have to happen again in the Senate because they’re going to deal with the same complicated issues we do. I hope they pass a bill, because [we] cannot keep going on this unsustainable path of Obamacare."

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