John McGuire and the acting Secretary of Labor paid a visit to UVA’s medical center to highlight a four-year-old program in which the hospital pays people to train for low-level healthcare jobs. Afterward, they agreed to a five-minute press conference where we asked McGuire what he would like to tell constituents who could no longer afford insurance premiums.
“We are actually working to make things more affordable. In the 5th congressional district, working with Glenn Youngkin, the previous governor, and President Trump we have negotiated almost $20 billion in investment into this district. That’s almost 7,000 high-paying jobs.”
He then attacked Democrats for the North American Free Trade Agreement, a pact signed more than 30 years ago, claiming it had cost Virginia jobs.
We pressed him on what that had to do with ending subsidies for people who needed help to pay for insurance through the Affordable Care Act.
“They were designed, by code, for the pandemic, so once the pandemic was over you would expect them to expired, and they did expire.”
And he claimed to be fighting fraud. Asked to elaborate, McGuire said he was part of the DOGE caucus which had documented thousands of cases where federal loans had not been repaid.
“It would probably blow your mind that there are thousands of government loans out there where not one person made one payment back.”
McGuire then said the Affordable Care Act was not affordable, that the federal government is throwing taxpayer money away, and we need to come up with a healthcare system that makes more sense. If it was a business, he said, it would be out of business.
