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Sep. Bernie SandersI-Vt., criticized eight Senate Democrats who joined Republicans in voting to advance the continuing resolution during a 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, eight Democrats voted with Republicans to allow them to move forward on this continuing resolution,” Sanders said. “And in my opinion, it was a very, very bad vote.”
The continuing resolution was originally designed to temporarily fund the federal government and prevent a shutdown, but Sanders said it contained provisions or omissions that could raise medical bonusespave the way for Medicaid cuts and benefit high-income people through tax changes.
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Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, speaks during a press conference at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, USA, on Wednesday, November 5, 2025. (Daniel Hoyer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Sanders said the measure would “raise health care premiums for more than 20 million Americans, doubling them and in some cases tripling or quadrupling them.” He continued: “People can't afford it because we already pay the highest prices in the world for healthcare.”
He goes on to say in the video that “this opens the door to 15 million people being kicked off Medicaid. Research shows that this would mean about 50,000 Americans would die unnecessarily each year. And all this was done to give 1% tax breaks on a trillion dollars.”
“As everyone knows, we just had elections across the country on Tuesday,” Sanders said. “And the election showed that the American people wanted us to stand up against Trumpism—his war on the working class, his authoritarianism. This is what the American people wanted. But that didn’t happen tonight.”
In Sanders' video, he describes the procedural vote not only as an attempt to keep government open, but as representing a broader political direction that he believes undermines health care protections and working-class interests.
“So we must move forward, do everything we can to keep working-class people safe and secure, to ensure that the United States not only does not cut off health care, but also ends the absurdity of being the only major country on earth that does not guarantee health care to all people,” Sanders said. “We have a lot of work to do, but to be honest, tonight wasn’t a good night.”
According to nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), if the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies enacted as part of the American Rescue Plan expire, millions of Americans could face higher market premiums. A CBO analysis of health insurance provisions in 2023 found that ending the expanded subsidies would significantly increase out-of-pocket costs for participants in the ACA marketplaces.
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Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and Senate Republicans are open to talks on extending Obamacare tax breaks, but only after the government reopens. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Studies cited by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, chaired by Sanders, also found that large-scale cuts to Medicaid could lead to tens of thousands of preventable deaths each year.
In 2023 HELP Committee Report On Sanders' website, the committee cited peer-reviewed studies published in the journals Health Relations and The Lancet Public Health, determining that 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 Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, which warned that proposed cuts to federal health care “could result in more than 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 reflect his long-standing opposition Proposals for the Republican Budget he says he favors the “1%” at the expense of working Americans.
