page_title: Jeanne Shaheen
section_title: Health care
hierarchical_section_title: Jeanne Shaheen / U.S. Senate / Tenure / Health care
caption_attribution_description: Healthcare_Presser_Gallery_073119 (99 of 117)
context_page_description: Cynthia Jeanne Shaheen is an American politician serving as the senior United States senator from New Hampshire. A member of the Democratic Party, she is the first female U.S. senator in New Hampshire's history, was the first female governor of New Hampshire, and was the first woman elected as both a governor and a U.S. senator in American history.
  After serving two terms in the New Hampshire Senate, Shaheen was elected governor in 1996 and reelected in 1998 and 2000. In 2002, she ran for the United States Senate unsuccessfully against Republican nominee John E. Sununu. She served as Director of the Harvard Institute of Politics before resigning to run for the U.S. Senate again in the 2008 election, defeating Sununu in a rematch. She is the dean of New Hampshire's congressional delegation.
  Shaheen became the first Democratic senator from New Hampshire since John A. Durkin, who was defeated in 1980. In 2014, she became only the second Democrat from New Hampshire to be reelected to the U.S. Senate and the first since Thomas J. McIntyre in 1972.
context_section_description: In 2009, Shaheen partnered with U.S. Senator Susan Collins to introduce the Medicare Transitional Care Act, which provides follow-up care for discharged hospital patients to reduce re-hospitalizations. The bill passed in 2010, and research at the University of Pennsylvania predicted the measure would lower the cost of health care by as much as $5,000 per Medicare beneficiary while also improving health care quality and reducing re-hospitalizations.
  In December 2009, Shaheen voted for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA; commonly called ObamaCare or the Affordable Care Act).
  In advance of the rollout of the PPACA, Shaheen said that people who liked their current health care plans could keep them. When asked about individuals who were losing their health care plans due to the PPACA, Shaheen said people could keep their health care plans if they were "willing to pay more."
  In August 2019 Shaheen was one of 19 senators to sign a letter to United States Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin and United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar requesting data from the Trump administration in order to help states and Congress understand the potential consequences of the Texas v. United States Affordable Care Act lawsuit, writing that an overhaul of the present health care system would form "an enormous hole in the pocketbooks of the people we serve as well as wreck state budgets".
  In October 2019 Shaheen was one of 27 senators to sign a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer advocating the passage of the Community Health Investment, Modernization, and Excellence (CHIME) Act, which was set to expire the following month. The senators warned that if the funding for the Community Health Center Fund (CHCF) was allowed to expire, it "would cause an estimated 2,400 site closures, 47,000 lost jobs, and threaten the health care of approximately 9 million Americans."
  Shaheen has sponsored numerous bills relating to diabetes, including gestational diabetes, that would, among other things, improve and increase access to diabetes education, increase access to diabetes medicine, and increase funding for diabetes research.
caption: Shaheen speaks on health care in 2019
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