Ranking Member Raskin’s Opening Statement at Joint Subcommittee Hearing on the Republican Health Care Affordability Crisis
Washington, D.C. (December 10, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at a joint subcommittee hearing on how millions of Americans are facing skyrocketing health care costs because Republicans have decided to strip the American people of their Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits.
Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks at today’s hearing.
WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
House Judiciary Committee
Hearing on “Fighting Obamacare Subsidy Fraud: Is the Administrative Procedure Act Working as Intended?”
December 10, 2025
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And thank you to all the witnesses for joining us today.
In three weeks, the ACA tax credits expire. So we’ve got a simple choice in Congress: we can give millions of American families more affordable health insurance by extending the ACA tax credits, or we can force on them drastic premium increases. That’s the choice. Any other rhetorical exercise today is a diversion and a distraction.
My colleagues want us to change the subject. They want to talk about the problem of fraud, the perennial problem of fraud. There are lots of things we can say about that, and maybe we can make some progress on it. But that’s a completely different issue. 15 years ago, the ACA passed, and this historic achievement gave millions of Americans who had been priced out of health care access actual access to health insurance and to lifesaving medical care with enhanced premium tax credits passed by Democrats. Coverage became more affordable for tens of millions of people who did not have access to health care.
But now, President Trump and our colleagues want to turn the hands of the clock back. They want to make health insurance more expensive for the American people. They want to allow tax credits for health insurance to expire. They have a solution to the affordability crisis in America, which they call a con job and a Democrat hoax, but which hundreds of millions of Americans live with every day. And their solution is to increase health insurance premiums for 22 million Americans by 75% on average. And for many Americans, their monthly premium payments are doubling or tripling.
A 60-year-old in my district who makes $82,000 a year will see their premium increase jump from $581 to $1552, a stunning 167% increase. A person making the same salary in our distinguished Chairman Jordan’s district will see a 248% jump in insurance rates, with a monthly premium increasing from $581 to $2022. Thanks to the Kaiser Family Foundation for breaking these down according to congressional districts so Members of Congress can understand what’s about to happen to our own people.
While our people are looking at working with no health insurance, sending their kids to school with no health insurance, trying to avoid getting the measles under the leadership of Secretary Kennedy at HHS with no health insurance, our colleagues just say, let them pack the emergency rooms, let them take two conspiracy theories and call me in the morning.
So, we talk about health care for Americans, and they change the subject to talk about fraud. That’s an old trick. When we talk about social security, they talk about fraud. When we talk about Medicare, they talk about fraud. When we talk about Medicaid, they talk about fraud. All because they oppose these programs for the people, not the fraudulent parts created by criminals who we need to chase down and prosecute, but rather the fairness parts created by Congress for the American people. So now we talk about extending health insurance, and they want to talk about fraud.
Well, why does President Trump have any standing to lecture anyone about fraud? Think about that for a second. He was criminally convicted by a unanimous jury of his peers on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal illegal payments he made. He was found guilty of defrauding the state of New York by lying about real estate values, and he owes hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains to the people of New York. But now he wants to distract us from their sweeping attack on the health care rights of the people by claiming to be enemies of fraud. What a joke.
The President just used his pardon power to commute the sentence and forgive the fines of a guy, a fellow criminal convict who defrauded the government of $1 billion by exploiting nursing homes and other senior care health facilities, one of the biggest frauds ever committed in the history of the United States.
He pardoned more than a dozen criminals who stole hundreds of millions of dollars from Medicare and Medicaid from the American people. He pardoned criminals who abused elderly patients and subjected them to unnecessary treatments that were described by the prosecutors in those cases as horrific and barbarian. If anyone wants to challenge me on any of these facts, I will read to you from the cases. I will give you the documentation. You might prefer not to look at who Donald Trump is pardoning, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
Not only did he free unrepentant, incorrigible fraudsters over the last 11 months, he relieved them of their fines and the restitution that they owed to pay their victims, a total right now of more than $1.3 billion and running. Before Trump, all the presidents had made the people actually pay off their fines and restitution. But not this president. A few weeks ago, he pardoned the former President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who brought in, check this out 400 tons, which translates to 800,000 pounds of cocaine, billions of individual doses of cocaine into our country, to quote, as the President of Honduras said, to “shove up the noses of the gringos,” as he so sweetly put it.
Our alleged “America first” President pardoned this sick, fascist, anti-gringo drug dealer while his War Secretary was blowing up alleged drug boats and killing 84 people, with no declaration of war by Congress and no due process, all allegedly in the name of stopping drugs. What a joke.
The President pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the mastermind behind the dark web platform Silkroad, that was used by drug dealers to sell $214 million worth of narcotics. That guy was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole. And yet, after Trump pardoned him on day one of his Administration, this guy is now back at work, a completely unrepentant criminal and a threat to public safety.
So, we’re being lectured by newly-minted anti-fraud fighters who uttered not a word about any of these pardons of drug traffickers and organized criminals, but people who said nothing when President Trump illegally sacked 17 Inspectors General in our government, the very people who are tasked with rooting out fraud, abuse and corruption in our government. In 2024 alone, they saved $71 billion, and they’ve been sacked and either not replaced or replaced with a bunch of political hacks.
10 million Americans have already lost their health insurance because of this obscene, ugly bill. A new CMS rule will rip care from 1.8 million Americans. Their plan to kill the ACA tax credit would mean another 4.8 million American families will no longer have health insurance.
Fraud is a criminal wrong and a serious threat to the well-being of our people. And no one’s doing more to stop it than the Democrats who built these programs that the fraudsters are going to jail for ripping off before being pardoned by the convicted fraudster President. Every dollar stolen is a threat to the infrastructure of our safety net. And yes, HHS, the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare services, and DOJ must do a lot more to fight it.
We must all fight, not pardon and exonerate the criminals and fraudsters who steal from the American people. But the way to fight fraud is with targeted anti-fraud measures, not to destroy the public programs that actually serve the American people. They want to get rid of health care that we want to protect, and we want to get rid of the fraudsters that they want to pardon. Choose your side.
I yield back to you, Mr. Chairman.