March 14,2018

Wyden Statement on Senate Floor on Trump’s Repeated Attacks on Women’s Health Care

As Prepared for Delivery

You can sum up the health care policy of the Trump administration in just one word -- discrimination. I’m here with my colleagues today to discuss another alarming example of the Trump agenda of health care discrimination, an example of where the administration is working overtime to make women’s health care worse.

What this particular case is all about is bureaucracy run amok. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, has decided to put ideology over the law of the land when it comes to the medical care available to the young women in its custody.

Under Director Scott Lloyd, the Office has attempted to block several immigrants from exercising their right to choose. It has no legal right to do so. This issue is settled law, but that hasn’t stopped the director and his agency from dragging these young women into prolonged, taxpayer-funded court battles.

There are roughly 5,000 young people in the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s custody. Most of them come from Central American countries. Many of the young women in the Office’s care are survivors of sexual violence. They’re on their own, and they didn’t come here to have somebody else’s ideology dictating their medical care. In my view, this Office ought to uphold its duty to provide all the care that these young women have a right to receive, and it ought to check the ideology at the door.

But that’s not how the Office of Refugee Resettlement is working under Mr. Lloyd. According to a recent report in Vice News, “Lloyd receives a spreadsheet every week containing information on every pregnant teen in ORR’s custody...”

He reportedly sought to interfere in a young woman’s medical procedure that was already underway. The report says that in another case, he put a young woman at further risk by directing staff to inform her parents -- against her wishes -- that she’d had an abortion.

Last fall, an HHS official was asked about Mr. Lloyd’s direction of the Office, and this matter of interfering in young women’s medical care. Here’s what the spokesman said:

“He by law has custody of these children, and just like a foster parent, he knows that that’s a lot of responsibility and he is going to make choices that he thinks are best for both the mother and the child.”

That is rampant government paternalism, and it’s all summed up in one sentence.

It should come as no surprise, given Mr. Lloyd’s background, that this is the direction the Office of Refugee Resettlement is taking. He’s made a career out of opposing women’s health care choices, fighting access to contraception and abortion services. And his views are right in line with this administration’s agenda of health care discrimination against women.

Right out of the gate, the administration and Republicans in Congress pushed for legislation that would have deprived hundreds of thousands of women the right to see the doctor of their choosing. It would have made it a lot harder for many of those women to obtain routine, vital medical care from providers like Planned Parenthood, including cancer screenings, prenatal care, preventive services, physicals and more.

Next, the Trump administration sought to deny women guaranteed, no-cost access to contraception. When women have guaranteed access to contraception, it means healthier pregnancies, healthier newborns, a lower risk of cancer, and economic fairness for women of modest means. But the Trump administration wants to roll back that guarantee.

The Trump team is green-lighting junk insurance policies that drive up the cost of health care for women with pre-existing conditions. They’re involved in elaborate discussions about the private insurance markets with the state of Idaho. Everybody ought to understand exactly what the Trump administration is saying to Idaho, because they’re going to say it to other states too.  The Trump administration is telling Idaho, “you can discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, just don’t be too obvious about it.”

The Trump administration is also exploring ways to place lifetime limits on the care people can get from Medicaid, which is a frightful proposition for the millions of older women who count on Medicaid to pick up the tab for their nursing and home-based care.

There are serious health care challenges facing this country. A raging epidemic of opioid misuse and abuse. The skyrocketing cost of prescription medicine. And when you’re talking about the Office of Refugee Resettlement, there’s a lot of work to be done fixing our broken immigration system.

Finally, it’s important to recognize how deep-seated this policy of health care discrimination really is. The example that my colleagues and I are talking about today is a case of massive ideological overreach and paternalism, but the Office of Refugee Resettlement is not the only place that’s happening. This discrimination against women must stop now.

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