Watch Kennedy’s comments here.

WASHINGTON – Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) today introduced and asked the Senate to pass the Protecting the American Taxpayer and Medicare Act, which would protect Medicare and other mandatory spending programs from planned sequestrations without raising the federal debt limit. Sen. Wyden (D-Ore.) blocked the bill’s passage.

“Americans depend on Medicare, especially while we’re still recovering from the pandemic. This bill would protect Medicare and other crucial programs from harmful cuts without enabling Pres. Biden’s Build Back Broker agenda. If Democrats want to raise the debt ceiling to fund trillions of dollars in extra spending while inflation is ravaging American families, they can do it themselves,” said Kennedy.

Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), John Boozman (R-Ark.), Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), John Hoeven (R-N.D.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) have cosponsored the legislation.

The Protecting the American Taxpayer and Medicare Act would:

• Delay the planned two percent Medicare sequester payment reductions that are scheduled to begin on Jan. 1, 2022.
• Waive Congress’s Pay-As-You-Go rule until 2023, which would prevent sequestration for all mandatory spending programs in 2022. This includes cuts to agricultural programs like Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage.
• Continue the three percent increase to Medicare physicians through Dec. 31, 2022 to help providers care for patients in the wake of the pandemic.
• Delay reductions in Medicare payments to clinical laboratory fees through Dec. 31, 2022 to preserve access to testing and laboratory services.
• Delay the implementation of the Medicare radiation oncology model through Dec. 31, 2022 to ensure access to care for cancer patients.
• Provide $45 million in savings to the Medicare Improvement Fund, for a total balance of $101 million.

Failure to waive the Pay-As-You-Go rule would result in $9.4 billion in cuts to Medicare hospital providers in 2022. Cuts to Medicare overall would be $36 billion, or a four percent reduction.

Some senators want to tie Medicare protections to a measure increasing the debt ceiling by a fixed dollar amount, even though Senate Democrats can address the debt ceiling themselves through the reconciliation process. Kennedy’s legislation would protect Medicare from sequestrations without also raising the debt ceiling.

Text of the Protecting the American Taxpayer and Medicare Act is available here.

Watch Kennedy’s comments here.

WASHINGTON – Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) penned this op-ed for Roll Call outlining how nuclear power can serve as a clean, powerful energy source that can help America defend against China’s authoritarian advance.

“Louisianians are facing rising energy prices at the same time as falling temperatures this winter. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden is pursuing policies that would further cripple the U.S. energy industry and the economy that depends on it, like flirting with shuttering the Line 5 pipeline.

“Our chief executive wants to shackle America with climate commitments that could make life unnecessarily hard for Americans struggling to pay energy bills under record inflation. At the same time, China, led by Xi Jinping—who, along with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, didn’t even bother to attend the recent Glasgow climate summit—continues to churn out carbon emissions that surpass those of the entire developed world, and Beijing’s authoritarian regime is gunning to outpace our economy.

“How can America pursue wise climate policies without hamstringing our economy in the face of a predatory China? If someone asked the president or some of my colleagues in Congress what they think the solution to climate change is, many of them would respond, ‘Renewable energy.’ It seems curious and inconsistent, then, that so many of them shun nuclear energy when it’s a safe, carbon-free option that yields enormous amounts of electricity. Wisdom and data suggest that America needs an all-of-the-above approach to energy, one that includes renewables, fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

“Nuclear energy is so clean that all the waste America’s commercial nuclear industry ever produced can fit into a single football field to a depth of fewer than 10 yards. It’s also incredibly efficient. It takes more than 3 million solar panels or more than 430 wind turbines—and the acres of land needed to host them—to produce the same amount of power as the average nuclear plant.

“Some may think nuclear energy’s advantages aren’t worth the risk. But Homer Simpson doesn’t run America’s power plants, and the industry has continuously evolved to make plants safer and more efficient.

“Small modular reactors, for example, are part of a promising new generation of advanced reactors that can automatically avoid overheating. These nuclear fission devices, which can be manufactured in a plant and brought to a site for installation, have a smaller physical footprint, and they produce less nuclear waste because they get more output from nuclear fuel. Some of these reactors are only about twice the length of the average school bus, while a traditional nuclear plant is roughly the size of Central Park. 

“The innovation doesn’t stop with small modular reactors. MIT researchers are planning to build a reactor that would generate energy the same way the sun does—through nuclear fusion. Compared with traditional fission plants, the waste produced during nuclear fusion is less radioactive, and the raw ingredients that fuel fusion are more abundant than uranium. 

“Fossil fuels, of course, are still a key part of America’s success. America’s economy is the largest in the world, and it can’t run without oil and gas. Eighty percent of America’s energy is from fossil fuels. Those resources support millions of U.S. jobs, and those jobs help make energy affordable for all Americans.

“Nuclear power adds to our country’s legacy of affordable, sustainable energy. Anyone who wants to grow America’s economy and safeguard the environment shouldn’t overlook the power of the atom. If nuclear energy doesn’t play a leading role in the U.S. energy portfolio, we will find it hard to maintain our place as a global leader because China’s polluting authoritarian regime is positioning itself to take over the global economy.

“Without safe, efficient fuel options like nuclear energy to power America through the 21st century, the world could quickly become a darker, dirtier place. People on both ends of the political spectrum should be able to see this threat and agree that nuclear energy must be part of any serious solution.”

The op-ed is available here.

WASHINGTON – Sens. John Kennedy (R-La.) and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) today introduced the Patient Advocate Tracker Act to increase transparency and accountability at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for veterans who report concerns they experience with VA health care services.

“Veterans have risked their lives on behalf of our country, and they deserve efficient, effective health care from the VA. The Patient Advocate Tracker Act would ensure the VA is more transparent and responsive to American service members by allowing them to file and track the status of their complaints. Bureaucracy shouldn’t keep veterans in the dark,” said Kennedy.  

“Our veterans have given so much to defend our freedoms, and I’m proud to join Senator Kennedy in introducing this bill that takes important steps toward making sure we have a transparent VA system that works for our veterans. Not only do we need to work to ensure every veteran has timely and effective access to care, we also must ensure that when there is an issue with their care, their concerns are addressed promptly and transparently,” Warnock said.

Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) introduced the bill in the House of Representatives.

“The Patient Advocate Tracker Act is commonsense legislation that will make the VA more transparent and cause less frustrations for our veterans. Veterans deserve the best healthcare possible, and when they receive subpar care, they need to be able to easily report complaints to their patient advocate, track it and get the best outcome possible. This bill will simplify the process and help them track their complaint,” said McClain.

The VA uses the patient advocate tracking system (PATS) to track and report complaints from veterans. The Patient Advocate Tracker Act would allow veterans to access PATS in order to file complaints and view the status of those health care concerns, including interim and final actions that the VA has taken to resolve issues facing individual veterans. 

By granting veterans access to PATS, VA employees could more effectively route veterans’ concerns to the appropriate department within the VA, avoiding unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles.  

Text of the Patient Advocate Tracker Act is available here.

Watch Kennedy’s remarks here.

WASHINGTON – Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) today spoke on the Senate floor about the Dobbs v. Jackson case, in which the Supreme Court will rule on whether pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are constitutional. The case gives the Supreme Court the opportunity to reaffirm states’ right to establish laws protecting the lives of unborn children and the wellbeing of their mothers.

Key excerpts from Kennedy’s speech include:

“Mr. President, we talk a lot in this chamber, as well we should, about the least among us—about how we can protect and lift up the powerless. And that’s a good thing. I can’t think of any person who has less power than . . . an unborn baby. Roe v. Wade is, of course, about abortion. We know that. But it’s also about something else. Roe v. Wade is also about federalism. Roe v. Wade is also about the American people. Roe v. Wade is about whether a finite group of the managerial elite, and by the manager elite, I mean the entrenched politicians, the bureaucracy, the media, the academics, the corporate phonies—all of whom think they’re smarter and more virtuous than the American people—should have the right to make moral decisions for the American people instead of the American people making those decisions for themselves. That’s really what Roe v. Wade is about.”

“I am pro-life. I am anti-Roe v. Wade. . . . But, Mr. President, even pro-choice legal scholars who believe in legalized abortion on demand understand—as does every fair-minded person who knows a law book from a J. Crew catalog—that Roe v. Wade is one of the most arbitrary, it’s one of the most ad hoc, it’s one of the most poorly-reasoned decisions in the history of the United States.”

“Anyone, Mr. President, who knows a law book from a J. Crew catalog also knows that there’s absolutely no foundation—not in the text, not in the structure, not in the history, not in the tradition of the Constitution—for a constitutional right to abortion, and certainly not on the basis of some unmoored general right to privacy that’s not enunciated in the Constitution.”

“In the Dobbs case, which the United States Supreme Court is about to hear, the United States Supreme Court has a really rare opportunity to say, as Justice Scalia wrote in one of his opinions, value judgments made on behalf of people should be voted on by those people and not dictated from Washington D.C. . . . That’s why we get to vote, and that’s why we have elected representatives—who oftentimes vote on our behalf—elected representatives who also can be unelected if we don’t like how they vote.”

“In Dobbs, the Supreme Court has the rare opportunity to de-federalize and de-constitutionalize abortion and return the issue to the states, where it was before Roe v. Wade.”

“The United States Supreme Court in Dobbs does not have the opportunity—and this is important—to say, ‘No right to an abortion in America.’ Let me say that again because some of the proponents of Roe v. Wade, I think, have shaded the truth on this. The issue before the Supreme Court and Dobbs is not the right to have an abortion. The issue for the Supreme Court in Dobbs is what’s the appropriate political forum to make these value judgments: Is it the government, or is it the people? And I hope, Mr. President, that the United States Supreme Court takes advantage of this rare opportunity before it.”

At the heart of the Dobbs case is the Mississippi Gestational Age Act, a state law prohibiting abortion after 15 weeks of gestation, except in cases of medical emergency.

Currently, the U.S. is one of seven nations, including human rights violators like North Korea and China, that allow elective abortions of children older than 20 weeks of gestation.

This summer, Kennedy joined more than 200 lawmakers in filing an amicus brief supporting Mississippi in the Dobbs case.

Video of Kennedy’s comments is available here.