Middle Class Health Benefits Tax Repeal Act of 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, over 122,000 cases of coronavirus, otherwise referred to as COVID-19, have been confirmed in the United States since the inception of the outbreak, including more than 5,000 confirmed cases in my home state of California alone. More than two thousand Americans have died as a result of the virus, and many more stand to do so if we do not act quickly to mitigate its spread and address the myriad of medical challenges.

While Congress has passed several measures to provide significant amounts of money for research activities at federal agencies, this is not enough. I am disappointed that H.R. 748 does not adequately fund nor provide incentives for, research and development into treatments and vaccines that leverage the expertise of the public and private sectors. Chiefly, the CARES Act fails to adequately support research on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus and at clinical research institutions across the country to pursue all reasonable avenues to develop treatments for the coronavirus, including diagnostic tests, therapies and vaccines. The NIH should have significantly more than $945 million to carry out COVID-19 related research and should also be directed to focus primarily on those possible treatments that are not subject to a patent and thus are not the focus of U.S. pharmaceutical companies.

Finally, the Trump administration uses this must-pass relief bill to advance their anti-reproduction rights agenda. The bill gives the Small Business Administration broad discretion to exclude Planned Parenthood affiliates and other non-profits serving people with low incomes and deny them benefits under the new small business loan program. Additionally, the bill attaches a harmful Hyde Amendment provision to a state stabilization fund for state, local, and tribal governments providing coronavirus relief. Reproductive health care is essential health care, and Planned Parenthood health centers are a critical component of the health care system. Attempting to limit access to reproductive health care services during a pandemic will only worsen the public health care crisis.

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