Midas Mighty, welcome to yet another episode of Midas Health.

We've been doing a lot of these recently and bringing the nation's best health care leaders,

legislators, biggest thinkers to help us really parse through what is noise, from what's

substantive, to help keep you and your families safe.

I'm excited to have yet another leader in Congress, one of our

nation's biggest leaders in the U.S. Congress, Representative Adam Smith of the state of Washington,

my home state, join us to talk about the impact of the shutdown on your health care and what this

means for your family when it comes to accessing needed medical services.

Representative Adam Smith, thank you for joining Midas Health.

Well, thank you.

And I appreciate the chance.

Very important topic.

Well, Adam, you know, you and I were talking before this episode, and I wanted to give you the floor just to explain to our viewers, our listeners, what the real world impacts are of this shutdown immediately

on health care benefits and then over time, what are we really talking about here? What are the

stakes? Well, the budget fight, the shutdown fight, has huge stakes. And it's really easy to sort

of think of it in two buckets. One is the broader budget, the budget that Trump and his Republican friends in Congress have put in place over the course of the last nine months, which, as Hakeem Jeffrey says all the time, has been the most devastating budget to health care in our lifetime.

The cuts to Medicaid, the cuts to the Affordable Care Act. If you want to broaden

health care, the cuts to food assistance, which obviously impact the health of people across

the country, this budget reflects a set of priorities that doesn't include health. It is going

to put millions of more people off of health insurance. They won't have insurance. And it'll

drive up the cost for everybody

else. So, and in place of that, they've done massive tax cuts primarily for the wealthy. They've done

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