Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Scott Vordiez. We have been talking at length, it seems like,
for a very long time over something that's not at
all unusual this time of year. A budget bill, Yeah,
a spending bill. What's the big deal? Well, this time
President Trump is back in office and he named it.
And if you know, if your kid brings home a
pet and names it, it's hard to get rid of
(00:22):
that pet. So President Trump said it's the big, beautiful bill,
and suddenly people were like, ooh, we've never had anything
like this before. It has a name, it's the same
as every other bill, but we named this one. But
there's a lot that's very different here. And it just
got out of the House and went to the Senate,
and the Senate just kicked it back to the House
(00:43):
and they think that later today they'll send it to
the President for his signature ahead of his deadline of
Independence day. We talk with one of those senators who
dealt a lot with this bill. Senator Pete Ricketts joins
us here on eleven ten, Kfabe's Senator, Good morning.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Good morning, Scot, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Have you ever seen any attention quite like this for
a bill just because the President named the thing.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Well, I gotta say I'm relatively new. I've only been
there two and a half years, but this has been
quite a big deal and really demonstrates.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
President's leadership to get this all pulled together.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
And push it and you know, god willing, if we're
gonna get it by his deadline and July fourth, that
would be fantastic.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Yeah, it's it's looking like members of Congress are coming
around here and they'll get the votes. And the Speaker
has been doing an excellent job here. If you're kind
of pulling all this together ahead of the president's deadline,
this as including here in Omaha, there are people rallying
against this bill. They say it's going to cut medicaid
(01:46):
and it'll it'll impact about seventy eight thousand Nebraskans. According
to the Nebraska Democratic Party, about seventy eight thousand Nebraskans
would be impacted by cuts to medicaid. This this is
something that you studied quite a bit. What are your
thoughts on that?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Well, I reject the premise out of hand, Medicaid will
continue to grow. Medicaid is going to be you know,
down the road billions and hundreds of billions of dollars
we're going to be spending more on medicaid over the
next ten years. So I reject the premise out of hand.
The reforms we're putting in things like saying illegal immigrants
cannot collect medicaid, those are good reforms. Some of the
(02:26):
other reforms are having community engagement for twenty hours a week.
This is something that we did for the Temporary Assistance
for Needy Families when Bill Clinton was president, So a
Democrat president put us in place, and we saw workforce
participation rates go up. I mean, this is something where
again we're saying you can go to school, you can volunteer,
you can work twenty hours a week to be able
(02:47):
to get Medicaid, which is a really cheap form of insurance.
And that's and it's applying to people who are basically,
you know, young and don't have kids and that sort
of thing. So we're talking about some big performs here
that are going to help make this more sustainable and
help protect it for the people Medicaid is really designed for,
which is the kids, elderly to disabled. That's who medicaid
(03:10):
is really supposed to be for. And of course, you
know these work requirements don't apply to those folks.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
K ETV talked to one of the protesters yesterday, a
guy named John, and he said, most of the nursing
home residents are there because of Medicaid. If they cut
that Medicaid out, they're going to live with their children, relatives,
or something else. So it's going to impact everybody. You're
rejecting that premise, and I'm wondering why if a k
(03:38):
ETV knows that not to be true, they choose to
put sound bites like that on their newscast.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
I can't tell you why they're doing what they're doing,
but I'll tell you right now that if you love,
go read the bill, because I did, and you look
and say, look, if you're one of those folks that
is a sor, this is not going to be impacting
because that's not where it's going. As you look at
some of the other stuff we're doing on the provider
(04:08):
rates and stuff like that, jrsing homes are exempted from that.
So I'm not even sure where they're coming up. There's
a lot of misinformation around there about this bill, and
that's part of the frustration that I have when we're
talking about how we're actually trying to make Medicaid sustainable
for the people who's designed to be for, which is
the elderly, the disabled children.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Yeah, well, I guess I don't blame them for allowing
the SoundBite on there. This is the way some people
think because this is what people have been telling them,
that old people and disabled people and sick kids are
going to be kicked off of Medicaid. And I don't
know how many times you and other members of Congress
(04:50):
have said that's not true, there are still people out
there who either believe it or continue to say it.
We talk here with Nebraska Senator Pete Ricketts. We talked
yes day on the program about the assessment from some
in the state that say that rural hospitals are going
to close because of these Medicaid cuts. They specifically looked
at the Webster County Hospital in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and
(05:13):
as an example of if we start doing all these
cuts to medicate, hospitals like this small one here in
Webster County are going to be forced to close down.
Do you have any concerns about the future of Nebraska's
rural hospitals.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
One of the things about the hospitals is that it's
a big fixed cost, and so you have to have
enough people coming through there. And right now we do
have rural hospitals that are struggling, you know, And I've
actually talked to folks in the industry, my team and
I both Mike's Fund, and I met with hospitals where
they were in DC and so one of the reasons
(05:51):
so this is even before this bill would obviously be passing.
So part of what we're doing in this bill is
putting aside fifty billion dollars over the next five years
to be able to help out. In the conversations I've had,
people told me that we need, you know, one hundred
and thirty three million dollars or so to be able
(06:11):
to make all the hospitals a hole, but then also
includes at least some examples where hospitals were mismanaged and
needed to be run better. In fact, about twenty percent
of that number was one hospital particular was being mismatched.
So part of this bill, for example, will give the
state of Nebraska one hundred million dollars to be able
to address some of these rural hospitals. And that's just
(06:33):
what the state will get directly, and then CMS will
have another one hundred million dollars well sorry, or five
billion dollars to distribute throughout the country. Two rural hospitals
will be able to apply for it. So, with that
in mind, given that rural hospitals are already slugging right now,
we set aside one hundred billion or ten billion dollars
a year for the next five years that will help
(06:54):
address this issue.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
I'll spare you my rant from yesterday about kicking hospital
staff off because of not getting the COVID shot, incentivizing
the traveling nurse circumstance, which took nurses away from rural
hospitals and then brought them back to in some of
the cases the same hospital hospitals at three times to pay,
and that has caused a lot of problems in these hospitals.
(07:17):
That's the that's the boiled down version of the rant.
One more question here about the bill. There are those
that say this is going to add anywhere between three
point five and five trillion dollars in new debt that
we can't take on in this country. What are your
thoughts on the assessment from among others, the Congressional Budget Office.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Well, when the CBS scored is appropriately, which is saying, hey,
the current policy is we have these task cuts in place,
so we're just going to leave them in place and
score it that way. It actually reduces the deficit by
five hundred and seven billion dollars. And I would also
point out the CBO when they're doing their scoring, shows
a very anemic one point eight percent growth. So go
(07:57):
back and look over the like the last ten to
fifteen years, and we see higher growth of that. So
if we get growth of say two point three percent,
which is more in line of where we've been, you're
actually talking about cutting the death SIP by anywhere between
two two and a half trillion dollars. And if we
get higher growth even more.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Another couple minutes here with Nebraska Senator Pete Ricketts on
news radio eleven ten KFAB, let's turn our attention for
a moment to immigration customs enforcement action. This story here
from again KETV news Watch seven says that they're about
an average of fifty five ICE detainees in Nebraska every
(08:36):
single day, and according to nationwide figures from an organization
that tracks such things, about seventy two percent of these
detainees have no criminal record other than being in the
country illegally. What are your thoughts on some of the
immigration customs operations that we've seen in Nebraska and across
the country.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Well, as you point out, being in the country illegally
is still breaking the law. So if you're breaking the law,
we got to enforce the law. And as you look
at some of the other things and you think about, well,
how are people working in the country illegally. If you
steal somebody's identity, that's not a victimist crime. As Ice
has been pointing out. If you steal somebody's so security
of them, for example, that could make it difficult for
(09:19):
somebody with disabilities to collect their disability check. It could
make it difficult for a student to be able to
get a student loan. So these are not victimist crimes.
President Trump ran on getting our immigration and border secure.
He's secured the border in a very short period of time.
And under President Biden, who had an open border policy,
(09:41):
you know, millions of people tried to get into our
country illegally, and President Trump has been elected to be
able to get this under control. So we should absolutely
focus on the people who've got the egregious criminal records.
We've got probably a half a million of six hundred
thousand people in the country illegally that have either been
convicted of things like murder or rape or something like that.
(10:03):
We should be totally focusing on those people first. Absolutely,
that's where I need to be able to prioritize what
they're going after. But again, if you're in the country illegally,
you're still breaking a law.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Yeah, there's the story. Here talks with Omaha immigration attorney
named Rachel Yamamoto, and she's talking about some of her clients. Now, look,
not every single person in this country illegally is a
murderous gang member. Not every single person in this country
illegally is a hard working individual who's not doing anything wrong.
(10:36):
But she's talking about this woman who came here, checked
in at the border, got registered with ICE and immigration
and so forth, had kids, raise kids here. One of
the kids was brought here like her in I don't
know if illegally is the right term, because they were
given some temporary status that has since expired. The long
(10:59):
wind did point I'm trying to make here is is
there any conversation in Congress to be able to look
at circumstances for people who are wanting to be here,
trying to be here, trying to assimilate, trying to be
law abiding other than the immigration issue, and find a
way for them to remain living and law abiding lee
(11:22):
here in America.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
First thing, first, we've got to address the border and
get that secure. That's part of what this bill that
is in front of the House today is going to do.
It's going to put about one hundred and seventy five
billion dollars of securing our border, and that will include
things like finishing the border wall system. And I say system,
because it's not just a wall. It's going to have sensors,
it's going to have cameras. It's going to be able
(11:46):
to allow us to monitor the entire lengths of that
southern border, to be able to not only prevent people
from from across the border illegally, but also the drugs
and all the other things that go along with that.
So that's the first thing we have to address right there,
is to be able to get at that southern border address.
And then of course it also has the You also,
(12:06):
what you point out here is but prisident Biden did
to some of these people, and I wonder if it
wasn't unsuspecting. You know, they didn't know this, but some
of new grant temporary status were like this parole program
where he prolled you know, literally over a million people
through this parole program that in the past that had
been used for five or six thousand people. It's a
(12:27):
temporary status of just two years and then you have
to go home. There's no next step in that parole program.
And to me, what Biden did it was just terrible
to give these people the expectations to get into this
country temporarily and then not have a next step for him.
So it really exposes the tragedy of what the Biden
administration did, and now the Trump administration is here to
(12:49):
clean this all up.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Senator, you got plans for Independence Day weekend? What are
you doing?
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Well, we're gonna be doing parades on Friday, and actually
a cousin of mine's getting married on Saturday, so we're
actually a cousin's child is getting married on I'm getting
that old and now my cousins are have kids that
are getting married. So that's kind of the plan for
a weekend. And we're actually back next week in DC.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Excellent. Thank you very much for all the time for
us this morning. Have a wonderful Independence Day holiday, and
congratulations to your cousin's kid on the exchange of nuptials
coming up on Saturday.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Grey, thanks Scott for much.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Scott by these mornings nine to eleven our news Radio
eleven ten KFAB
Scott Vordiez. We have been talking at length, it seems like,
for a very long time over something that's not at
all unusual this time of year. A budget bill, Yeah,
a spending bill. What's the big deal? Well, this time
President Trump is back in office and he named it.
And if you know, if your kid brings home a
pet and names it, it's hard to get rid of
(00:22):
that pet. So President Trump said it's the big, beautiful bill,
and suddenly people were like, ooh, we've never had anything
like this before. It has a name, it's the same
as every other bill, but we named this one. But
there's a lot that's very different here. And it just
got out of the House and went to the Senate,
and the Senate just kicked it back to the House
(00:43):
and they think that later today they'll send it to
the President for his signature ahead of his deadline of
Independence day. We talk with one of those senators who
dealt a lot with this bill. Senator Pete Ricketts joins
us here on eleven ten, Kfabe's Senator, Good morning.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Good morning, Scot, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Have you ever seen any attention quite like this for
a bill just because the President named the thing.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Well, I gotta say I'm relatively new. I've only been
there two and a half years, but this has been
quite a big deal and really demonstrates.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
President's leadership to get this all pulled together.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
And push it and you know, god willing, if we're
gonna get it by his deadline and July fourth, that
would be fantastic.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Yeah, it's it's looking like members of Congress are coming
around here and they'll get the votes. And the Speaker
has been doing an excellent job here. If you're kind
of pulling all this together ahead of the president's deadline,
this as including here in Omaha, there are people rallying
against this bill. They say it's going to cut medicaid
(01:46):
and it'll it'll impact about seventy eight thousand Nebraskans. According
to the Nebraska Democratic Party, about seventy eight thousand Nebraskans
would be impacted by cuts to medicaid. This this is
something that you studied quite a bit. What are your
thoughts on that?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Well, I reject the premise out of hand, Medicaid will
continue to grow. Medicaid is going to be you know,
down the road billions and hundreds of billions of dollars
we're going to be spending more on medicaid over the
next ten years. So I reject the premise out of hand.
The reforms we're putting in things like saying illegal immigrants
cannot collect medicaid, those are good reforms. Some of the
(02:26):
other reforms are having community engagement for twenty hours a week.
This is something that we did for the Temporary Assistance
for Needy Families when Bill Clinton was president, So a
Democrat president put us in place, and we saw workforce
participation rates go up. I mean, this is something where
again we're saying you can go to school, you can volunteer,
you can work twenty hours a week to be able
(02:47):
to get Medicaid, which is a really cheap form of insurance.
And that's and it's applying to people who are basically,
you know, young and don't have kids and that sort
of thing. So we're talking about some big performs here
that are going to help make this more sustainable and
help protect it for the people Medicaid is really designed for,
which is the kids, elderly to disabled. That's who medicaid
(03:10):
is really supposed to be for. And of course, you
know these work requirements don't apply to those folks.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
K ETV talked to one of the protesters yesterday, a
guy named John, and he said, most of the nursing
home residents are there because of Medicaid. If they cut
that Medicaid out, they're going to live with their children, relatives,
or something else. So it's going to impact everybody. You're
rejecting that premise, and I'm wondering why if a k
(03:38):
ETV knows that not to be true, they choose to
put sound bites like that on their newscast.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
I can't tell you why they're doing what they're doing,
but I'll tell you right now that if you love,
go read the bill, because I did, and you look
and say, look, if you're one of those folks that
is a sor, this is not going to be impacting
because that's not where it's going. As you look at
some of the other stuff we're doing on the provider
(04:08):
rates and stuff like that, jrsing homes are exempted from that.
So I'm not even sure where they're coming up. There's
a lot of misinformation around there about this bill, and
that's part of the frustration that I have when we're
talking about how we're actually trying to make Medicaid sustainable
for the people who's designed to be for, which is
the elderly, the disabled children.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Yeah, well, I guess I don't blame them for allowing
the SoundBite on there. This is the way some people
think because this is what people have been telling them,
that old people and disabled people and sick kids are
going to be kicked off of Medicaid. And I don't
know how many times you and other members of Congress
(04:50):
have said that's not true, there are still people out
there who either believe it or continue to say it.
We talk here with Nebraska Senator Pete Ricketts. We talked
yes day on the program about the assessment from some
in the state that say that rural hospitals are going
to close because of these Medicaid cuts. They specifically looked
at the Webster County Hospital in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and
(05:13):
as an example of if we start doing all these
cuts to medicate, hospitals like this small one here in
Webster County are going to be forced to close down.
Do you have any concerns about the future of Nebraska's
rural hospitals.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
One of the things about the hospitals is that it's
a big fixed cost, and so you have to have
enough people coming through there. And right now we do
have rural hospitals that are struggling, you know, And I've
actually talked to folks in the industry, my team and
I both Mike's Fund, and I met with hospitals where
they were in DC and so one of the reasons
(05:51):
so this is even before this bill would obviously be passing.
So part of what we're doing in this bill is
putting aside fifty billion dollars over the next five years
to be able to help out. In the conversations I've had,
people told me that we need, you know, one hundred
and thirty three million dollars or so to be able
(06:11):
to make all the hospitals a hole, but then also
includes at least some examples where hospitals were mismanaged and
needed to be run better. In fact, about twenty percent
of that number was one hospital particular was being mismatched.
So part of this bill, for example, will give the
state of Nebraska one hundred million dollars to be able
to address some of these rural hospitals. And that's just
(06:33):
what the state will get directly, and then CMS will
have another one hundred million dollars well sorry, or five
billion dollars to distribute throughout the country. Two rural hospitals
will be able to apply for it. So, with that
in mind, given that rural hospitals are already slugging right now,
we set aside one hundred billion or ten billion dollars
a year for the next five years that will help
(06:54):
address this issue.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
I'll spare you my rant from yesterday about kicking hospital
staff off because of not getting the COVID shot, incentivizing
the traveling nurse circumstance, which took nurses away from rural
hospitals and then brought them back to in some of
the cases the same hospital hospitals at three times to pay,
and that has caused a lot of problems in these hospitals.
(07:17):
That's the that's the boiled down version of the rant.
One more question here about the bill. There are those
that say this is going to add anywhere between three
point five and five trillion dollars in new debt that
we can't take on in this country. What are your
thoughts on the assessment from among others, the Congressional Budget Office.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Well, when the CBS scored is appropriately, which is saying, hey,
the current policy is we have these task cuts in place,
so we're just going to leave them in place and
score it that way. It actually reduces the deficit by
five hundred and seven billion dollars. And I would also
point out the CBO when they're doing their scoring, shows
a very anemic one point eight percent growth. So go
(07:57):
back and look over the like the last ten to
fifteen years, and we see higher growth of that. So
if we get growth of say two point three percent,
which is more in line of where we've been, you're
actually talking about cutting the death SIP by anywhere between
two two and a half trillion dollars. And if we
get higher growth even more.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Another couple minutes here with Nebraska Senator Pete Ricketts on
news radio eleven ten KFAB, let's turn our attention for
a moment to immigration customs enforcement action. This story here
from again KETV news Watch seven says that they're about
an average of fifty five ICE detainees in Nebraska every
(08:36):
single day, and according to nationwide figures from an organization
that tracks such things, about seventy two percent of these
detainees have no criminal record other than being in the
country illegally. What are your thoughts on some of the
immigration customs operations that we've seen in Nebraska and across
the country.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Well, as you point out, being in the country illegally
is still breaking the law. So if you're breaking the law,
we got to enforce the law. And as you look
at some of the other things and you think about, well,
how are people working in the country illegally. If you
steal somebody's identity, that's not a victimist crime. As Ice
has been pointing out. If you steal somebody's so security
of them, for example, that could make it difficult for
(09:19):
somebody with disabilities to collect their disability check. It could
make it difficult for a student to be able to
get a student loan. So these are not victimist crimes.
President Trump ran on getting our immigration and border secure.
He's secured the border in a very short period of time.
And under President Biden, who had an open border policy,
(09:41):
you know, millions of people tried to get into our
country illegally, and President Trump has been elected to be
able to get this under control. So we should absolutely
focus on the people who've got the egregious criminal records.
We've got probably a half a million of six hundred
thousand people in the country illegally that have either been
convicted of things like murder or rape or something like that.
(10:03):
We should be totally focusing on those people first. Absolutely,
that's where I need to be able to prioritize what
they're going after. But again, if you're in the country illegally,
you're still breaking a law.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Yeah, there's the story. Here talks with Omaha immigration attorney
named Rachel Yamamoto, and she's talking about some of her clients. Now, look,
not every single person in this country illegally is a
murderous gang member. Not every single person in this country
illegally is a hard working individual who's not doing anything wrong.
(10:36):
But she's talking about this woman who came here, checked
in at the border, got registered with ICE and immigration
and so forth, had kids, raise kids here. One of
the kids was brought here like her in I don't
know if illegally is the right term, because they were
given some temporary status that has since expired. The long
(10:59):
wind did point I'm trying to make here is is
there any conversation in Congress to be able to look
at circumstances for people who are wanting to be here,
trying to be here, trying to assimilate, trying to be
law abiding other than the immigration issue, and find a
way for them to remain living and law abiding lee
(11:22):
here in America.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
First thing, first, we've got to address the border and
get that secure. That's part of what this bill that
is in front of the House today is going to do.
It's going to put about one hundred and seventy five
billion dollars of securing our border, and that will include
things like finishing the border wall system. And I say system,
because it's not just a wall. It's going to have sensors,
it's going to have cameras. It's going to be able
(11:46):
to allow us to monitor the entire lengths of that
southern border, to be able to not only prevent people
from from across the border illegally, but also the drugs
and all the other things that go along with that.
So that's the first thing we have to address right there,
is to be able to get at that southern border address.
And then of course it also has the You also,
(12:06):
what you point out here is but prisident Biden did
to some of these people, and I wonder if it
wasn't unsuspecting. You know, they didn't know this, but some
of new grant temporary status were like this parole program
where he prolled you know, literally over a million people
through this parole program that in the past that had
been used for five or six thousand people. It's a
(12:27):
temporary status of just two years and then you have
to go home. There's no next step in that parole program.
And to me, what Biden did it was just terrible
to give these people the expectations to get into this
country temporarily and then not have a next step for him.
So it really exposes the tragedy of what the Biden
administration did, and now the Trump administration is here to
(12:49):
clean this all up.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Senator, you got plans for Independence Day weekend? What are
you doing?
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Well, we're gonna be doing parades on Friday, and actually
a cousin of mine's getting married on Saturday, so we're
actually a cousin's child is getting married on I'm getting
that old and now my cousins are have kids that
are getting married. So that's kind of the plan for
a weekend. And we're actually back next week in DC.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Excellent. Thank you very much for all the time for
us this morning. Have a wonderful Independence Day holiday, and
congratulations to your cousin's kid on the exchange of nuptials
coming up on Saturday.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Grey, thanks Scott for much.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Scott by these mornings nine to eleven our news Radio
eleven ten KFAB
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