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mike crapo
Sanders Gets GOP Leader to Agree to Work On Medicare Covering Dental, Hearing, and Vision
The exchange on the Senate floor came after the Finance Committee chair blocked passage of the Vermont Independent's bill.
Mar 11, 2025
U.S. Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo on Tuesday blocked passage of Sen. Bernie Sanders' legislation to expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing, and vision care for tens of millions of American seniors, but the bill's sponsor got the panel leader to publicly agree to further discuss the issue.
Sanders (I-Vt.) took to the Senate floor Tuesday afternoon to ask for unanimous consent to pass the Medicare Dental, Hearing, and Vision Expansion Act, which is spearheaded in the House of Representatives by Congressman Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas).
"In the richest country in the history of the world, it is unacceptable that millions of seniors are unable to read because they can't afford eyeglasses, can't have conversations with their grandchildren because they can't afford hearing aids, and have trouble eating because they can't afford dentures," Sanders said in a statement.
"That should not be happening in the United States of America in the year 2025," he continued. "The time is long overdue for Congress to expand Medicare to include comprehensive coverage for the dental, vision, and hearing care that our seniors desperately need."
After Crapo (R-Idaho) rose to stop the bill from advancing, he and Sanders had a brief exchange in which the Republican agreed to working on achieving the "outcome" of the federal healthcare program covering dental, vision, and hearing.
In Sanders' remarks on the Senate floor about his bill, he sounded the alarm about efforts by President Donald Trump, billionaire Elon Musk, and congressional Republicans to cut government healthcare programs and Social Security.
"Yeah, we have more nuclear weapons than any other country, we have more billionaires than any other country, but we also have one of the highest rates of senior poverty of any country on Earth. We might want to get our priorities right," said Sanders, who has long fought for achieving universal healthcare in the United States via his Medicare for All legislation.
"While my Republican colleagues would like to make massive cuts to Medicaid in order to provide more tax breaks to billionaires, some of us have a better idea," he said. "We think that it makes more sense to substantially improve the lives of our nation's seniors by expanding Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing benefits."
To pay for his expansion plan, Sanders calls for ensuring that Medicare pays no more for prescription drugs than the Department of Veterans Affairs and addressing the tens of billions of dollars that privately administered Medicare Advantage plans overcharge the federal government annually.
In a statement about the bill, Doggett highlighted that "this expanded care could help prevent cognitive impairment and dementia, worsened chronic disease, and imbalance leading to falls with deadly consequences. This is an essential step to fulfilling the original promise of Medicare—to assure dignity and health for all."
Welcoming their renewed push for Medicare expansion, Public Citizen healthcare advocate Eagan Kemp declared that "at the same time Trump and his cronies in Congress try to rip healthcare away from millions and push for further privatization of Medicare, Sen. Sanders and Rep. Doggett are showing what one of our top priorities in healthcare should be—improving traditional Medicare."
"The introduction of this legislation is an important step to ensure Medicare enrollees can access the care they need, and we hope that Congress will act quickly to pass these commonsense reforms," Kemp added. "Healthcare is a human right."
Earlier Tuesday, in anticipation of Crapo's committee holding a confirmation hearing for Dr. Mehmet Oz, the former television host Trump has nominated to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, Public Citizen released a research brief about the hundreds of millions of dollars Medicare Advantage companies have spent on lobbying.
"If Oz is confirmed as the CMS administrator," Kemp warned, "attacks on traditional Medicare are likely to move into overdrive."
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Pharma-Funded Republicans Go to Bat for Drug Industry as Medicare Moves to Negotiate Prices
"Did a Big Pharma CEO write these talking points for you on the back of a campaign check?" one critic asked Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn.
Aug 31, 2023
Polling data released this week shows that nearly 90% of Republican voters support allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies.
But congressional Republicans—many of whom receive substantial funding from the pharmaceutical industry—have staked out the opposite position, bashing the Biden administration's rollout of the initial list of medications that will be subject to price negotiations and parroting drugmakers' arguments against the popular reforms.
"The Inflation Reduction Act's socialist drug price controls will stunt the development of lifesaving treatments and cures while granting the government more unnecessary control over Americans' lives," Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) wrote on social media, invoking the well-worn and misleading narrative that curbing medicine costs would stifle innovation.
Blackburn received $215,500 in campaign donations from pharma and other health product PACs between 2017 and 2022, according to OpenSecrets.
"Did a Big Pharma CEO write these talking points for you on the back of a campaign check?" Tennessee State Rep. Gloria Johnson (D-90) wrote in response to Blackburn. (Johnson is currently exploring a U.S. Senate run against the Republican.)
Every GOP lawmaker in the U.S. House and Senate voted against the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which requires Medicare to negotiate the prices of a subset of high-cost prescription drugs. After the legislation passed, Republicans swiftly began working to roll it back, taking specific aim at Medicare's new authority to negotiate drug prices, which are far higher in the U.S. than in other wealthy nations.
Republican presidential candidates—including former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP nomination—have also vocally criticized the law and suggested they would work to repeal it if they win in 2024.
Earlier this week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services listed the first 10 drugs it plans to negotiate, drawing predictable backlash from the pharmaceutical industry, which lobbied against the IRA's passage and is now suing over the drug pricing provisions. Several of the drugs included on the initial list were already set to face generic competition in the coming years.
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the IRA's drug pricing reforms will save Medicare $160 billion over the next decade.
"Any effort by far-right Republicans to paint lowering the costs of prescription drug prices for Americans as a bad thing is laughable."
With President Joe Biden looking to make the drug price negotiations a centerpiece of his 2024 reelection campaign, Republican strategists are urging the GOP to aggressively counter the White House with messaging that mirrors industry claims about the IRA's potential impact on innovation—claims that advocates have long dismissed as false and self-serving.
"Republicans have to figure out how to go after it," Joe Grogan, a Republican strategist who served as a domestic policy adviser for Trump, told Politico. "They go after it by taking it head on: it is killing clinical programs, fundamentally restricting the amount of treatments."
Some GOP lawmakers are taking just that approach.
Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), whose campaign received $253,400 from pharma and health product PACs between 2017 and 2022, said in a statement Tuesday that Medicare price negotiations "risk reversing decades of progress on bringing lifesaving treatments and medical breakthroughs to American patients."
Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), who has received donations from drug companies that are suing the Biden administration over the price negotiations, added that "the Biden administration is trying to take a victory lap while at the same time they are pricing seniors out of their healthcare and ensuring future cures never reach those who need them."
A 2021 report by Patients for Affordable Drugs concluded that "Big Pharma's innovation argument just does not stand up to scrutiny," noting that "the money that U.S.-based drug companies make by charging Americans high prices is 76% greater than what's needed to fund their entire global research and development expenditures."
Democrats have vowed to combat attempts by the pharmaceutical industry and Republicans to sabotage or repeal the IRA, which represents a modest effort to rein in drugmakers' power to drive up prices.
"The products that will now be subject to negotiation are used by millions of seniors in Medicare each year, costing each of them thousands of dollars," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chair of the Senate Finance Committee. "I will be following the negotiation process closely and will fight any attempt by Big Pharma to undo or undermine the progress that's been made."
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) argued Wednesday that "any effort by far-right Republicans to paint lowering the costs of prescription drug prices for Americans as a bad thing is laughable."
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GOP Author of Bank Deregulation Law Says 'No Need' for Tougher Safeguards
"You have to be hard-core committed to mindless free-market fundamentalism—or truly in thrall to your donors—to insist there's no need for new regulations after Silicon Valley Bank," said one critic.
Mar 16, 2023
Republican Sen. Mike Crapo, the lead author of a 2018 bank deregulation law that weakened key guardrails designed to prevent another financial crisis, insisted this week that there is "no need" to impose more strict rules following two of the largest bank collapses in U.S. history.
"There is no need for regulatory reform," said Crapo, who chaired the Senate Banking Committee when Congress passed the 2018 law despite vocal warnings from experts that it would destabilize the banking sector. Dozens of Democrats supported the measure.
In a Fox Business appearance on Tuesday, the Idaho Republican deflected blame for the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, both of which were in the category of firms that saw regulatory relief thanks to the 2018 law.
"The fact is that President Biden—through all of the spending that he did in the last Congress and the last two years—has driven inflation up to the point where wage earners have to get a 14.8% wage increase just to hold even with this kind of inflation," said Crapo. "And when the Fed responded to push interest rates up, that's what caused a liquidity crisis for these two banks."
While analysts agree that the Fed's aggressive interest rate hikes are at least partly to blame for the collapse of SVB and Signature Bank, they also argue that the 2018 law's removal of enhanced capital requirements and stress tests for banks with between $50 billion and $250 billion in assets—reforms implemented by the post-financial crisis Dodd-Frank Act—also played a significant role.
"You have to be hard-core committed to mindless free-market fundamentalism—or truly in thrall to your donors—to insist there's no need for new regulations after Silicon Valley Bank," wrote Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen. (Crapo received more than $880,000 in donations from the securities and investment industry between 2017 and 2022, according to OpenSecrets.)
In effect, the 2018 law ( S.2155) removed the "systemically important" designation and the associated regulations from SVB and Signature Bank—a change that didn't stop the Fed and the Biden administration from rushing in to backstop the financial system and prevent "contagion" after the firms collapsed.
"Congress gave regulators permission to take their eyes off of these mid-sized regional banks."
SVB's announcement last week that it sold its bond portfolio at a major loss and was trying to raise funds led venture capitalists to advise startups—SVB's primary clientele—to withdraw their money, setting off a bank run that ultimately resulted in the firm's failure and takeover by regulators.
"The federal government then stepped in to guarantee the deposits, a dramatic move designed to prevent the panic from spreading to other banks," HuffPost's Arthur Delaney noted Wednesday. "But this kind of intervention... was not supposed to be necessary. The enhanced prudential standards under Dodd-Frank include liquidity requirements that would have automatically covered Silicon Valley Bank if Congress hadn't relaxed the law in 2018."
As former FDIC attorney Todd Phillips toldThe Washington Post earlier this week, "Congress gave regulators permission to take their eyes off of these mid-sized regional banks."
Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University, similarly observed that the 2018 law "did indeed reduce regulatory requirements for banks like Silicon Valley Bank."
"While it is impossible to say categorically that legislative rollback equals the bank’s collapse," Allen added, "it does seem that it made it more likely."
The Fed, as then-central bank governor Lael Brainard lamented in 2019, proceeded to take the Republican-authored law and run with it, further weakening safeguards against financial chaos.
"I see little benefit to the banks or the system from the proposed reduction in core resilience that would justify the increased risk to financial stability in the future," Brainard said in a statement at the time.
On Tuesday, dozens of lawmakers led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) introduced legislation that would repeal the section of the 2018 law that relaxed regulations for banks with less than $250 billion in assets.
In a floor speech, Warren said that "both SVB and Signature Bank suffered from a toxic mix of poor risk management and weak supervision."
"If Congress and the Federal Reserve had not rolled back key provisions of Dodd-Frank, these banks would have been subject to stronger liquidity and capital requirements to help withstand financial shocks," Warren continued. "These threats never should have been allowed to materialize. Now, we must prevent them from occurring again by reversing the dangerous bank deregulation of the Trump era."
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