Former Gov. Roy Cooper said Friday, September 19, that congressional Republicans’ tax and spending bill had put Medicaid expansion in North Carolina “in danger.”
Cooper, a Democrat who is now running for U.S. Senate, oversaw the passage of Medicaid expansion while serving as governor. He frequently touts it as one of the highlights of his eight-year administration.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with waste, fraud and abuse,” Cooper said, pushing back on Republicans’ arguments that the bill will cut trim costs and bureaucracy. “They were creating this … so they could give people tax breaks.”
His criticism of the GOP-led “big, beautiful bill” came during a roundtable focused on health care costs and Medicaid — one of his first public appearances since formally launching his bid for Senate. And Cooper criticized his Republican opponent Michael Whatley’s support of the package.
“D.C. is broken,” Cooper said. “It is absolutely chaotic and broken.”
Whatley, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, has called the bill “the embodiment of our agenda,” and said it should be a key part of Republican messaging going forward.
Cooper was joined Friday by Kody Kinsley, who served as health secretary during his administration, as well as a physician, child care business owner and mother of a child with cerebral palsy.
Kinsley described a “ticking time bomb of health care costs for individuals, right around the corner.” And Dr. Michael Baca-Atlas, a Raleigh-based family physician, said he expected that “we will lose patients” who have come to his practice under Medicaid expansion.
This article appears courtesy of our media partner NC Newsline.