Congressman Rich McCormick M.D. Opines On The Biden presidency
by John Grimaldi
Congressman Rich McCormick [R-GA] was a Marine pilot, an Emergency Room doctor and now he is a “Republican warrior in Congress.” In a recent appearance on the AMAC Better For America podcast, he discussed a wide range of political issues with host Rebecca Weber, CEO of the Association of Mature American Citizens, including government spending, health care issues, President Biden’s open Mexican border and the state of Social Security.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act that President Biden signed into law is intended to avert a debt default and set government spending limits for two years. McCormick was one of 71 members of Congress who voted against the spending bill and he told Weber that whatever savings are to be had under this new law, it doesn’t stop the president from using an executive order to override the legislation’s limitations, which are based on just 11% of the budget. The president,” still continues to have privileges that are out of check. So, any meager savings we might have can be overridden by an executive order and that was my red line” when it came time to vote on it.
Noting that health care is a big-buck share of the budget, Representative McCormick went on to praise the introduction of the Helping Everyone Access Long Term Healthcare [the HEALTH Act]. It offers a solution that would help provide healthcare services for low-income individuals and families and help Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Programs (CHIP) save on costs. The legislation would let doctors and other healthcare workers offer free care services for the needy in exchange for a charitable tax deduction. McCormick explained that some doctors don’t accept Medicaid because it doesn’t pay its bills.
The HEALTH Act “allows doctors to see people who are basically impoverished, people who are on Medicaid, people who need help. It basically is a tax credit that lets us continue to see patients. What we want to do is serve patients and do what is right. But if you’re doing it at a larger payer mix than you can afford, you have to limit the number of Medicaid patients.”
Doctor McCormick went on to address another health issue that has emerged since Joe Biden and his progressive lawmakers took office and opened the Mexican border allowing illicit drug traffickers to enter the country. “It is a very real problem and it’s created at the southern border. There are a lot of nefarious people involved with drug trafficking at the southern border. A lot of bad guys come across the border with no accountability. We have a record number of terrorists who have been caught and have encouraged people to break the law, thanks to the Biden administration.” McCormick said that the numbers of Americans — mainly kids — who’ve died due to drug overdoses thanks to this administration’s come-one-come-all migrant policies is in the hundreds of thousands.
But, he said, America has been overwhelmed by “societal problems, whether it be crime, gun violence, drug overdoses, suicide. Once again, you can make laws and rules. [But] you cannot get rid of racism, for example, with a law. We keep on turning to the very institution that created the problem to begin with. And the more we do that, the more we’re going to lose our way. I’m a conservative. I believe that we are the solution, that the Constitution was created to empower us. We are unique in that way. That’s what has made America wildly successful. And the more we turn to the government to solve our problems, the worse our problems get.”
McCormick said that President Biden didn’t make things any better when he relied on a “dishonest” argument in his State of the Union address. “The president said that Republicans want to cut Social Security. But the Social Security law was a bipartisan endeavor and so to say Republicans want to cut Social Security is a deliberate lie. We want to save it, but we will have to make some hard decisions. When Social Security was initially instituted, it had an age limit based on age expectancy to see that time. Since then, our age expectancy has gone dramatically up, but the law remains the same. So we have to have a conversation about that. I don’t think we can continue with what we have right now. That’s obvious. It will become insolvent. I’m open to any solution that’s going to save Social Security.”