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Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., criticized the eight Senate Democrats who joined Republicans in voting to advance a continuing resolution during the procedural vote in the U.S. Senate on Sunday.
Sanders called the move “a very, very bad vote” in a video posted to his X account.
“Tonight, 8 Democrats voted with the Republicans to allow them to go forward on this continuing resolution,” Sanders said. “And to my mind, this was a very, very bad vote.”
The continuing resolution was originally designed to temporarily fund the federal government and avert a shutdown but, according to Sanders, it contained provisions or omissions that would raise healthcare premiums, set the stage for Medicaid cuts and benefit high-income earners through tax changes.
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Sanders argued the measure “raises healthcare premiums for over 20 million Americans by doubling, and in some cases tripling or quadrupling them.” He continued, “People can’t afford that when we are already paying the highest prices in the world for healthcare.”
He goes on to say in the video that “it paves the way for 15 million people to be thrown off of Medicaid. Studies show that will mean some 50,000 Americans will die every year unnecessarily. And all of that was done to give a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the 1%.”
“As everybody knows, just on Tuesday, we had an election all over this country,” Sanders said. “And what the election showed is that the American people wanted us to stand up to Trumpism — to his war against working-class people, to his authoritarianism. That is what the American people wanted. But tonight, that is not what happened.”
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In Sanders’ video, he frames the procedural vote as not only about keeping the government open, but as representing a broader policy direction that, in his view, undermined healthcare protections and working-class interests.
“So we’ve got to go forward, do the best that we can to ensure and protect working-class people, to make sure that the United States not only does not throw people off of healthcare, but ends the absurdity of being the only major country on earth that doesn’t guarantee healthcare to all people,” Sanders said. “We have a lot of work to do, but to be honest with you, tonight was not a good night.”
According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), if the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies enacted under the American Rescue Plan are allowed to expire, millions of Americans could face higher marketplace premiums. The CBO’s 2023 analysis of health coverage provisions showed that ending the expanded subsidies would significantly increase out-of-pocket costs for enrollees in ACA marketplaces.
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Studies cited by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), chaired by Sanders, have also estimated that large-scale cuts to Medicaid could lead to tens of thousands of preventable deaths annually.
In a 2023 HELP Committee report on Sanders’ website, the committee referenced peer-reviewed research published in Health Affairs and The Lancet Public Health, determining that a loss of Medicaid coverage is associated with higher mortality due to decreased access to preventive and emergency care.
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The report is also supported by other documents on the site, including findings from a June 2025 letter from researchers at the Yale School of Public Health and the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, which warned that proposed federal healthcare cuts “could lead to over 51,000 preventable deaths annually.”
Sanders’ comments were published on his official website in many of his press releases dating back to March of this year and echo his longstanding opposition to Republican budget proposals he says favor “the 1%” at the expense of working Americans.
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