But their representatives want to screw them Hard.
They swore up and down that they weren’t touching Medicaid. Yet here we are:
House Republicans released the first draft of their legislation cutting Medicaid to help pay for $5 trillion of tax cuts in what President Donald Trump calls the “big, beautiful bill” at the center of his domestic policy agenda.
The legislation would impose new limits on Medicaid benefits to unemployed adults and require more frequent eligibility checks as part of a reform package that would save $715 billion on federal health spending over a decade, according to a preliminary analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
“When so many Americans who are truly in need rely on Medicaid for life-saving services, Washington can’t afford to undermine the program further by subsidizing capable adults who choose not to work,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed accompanying the bill release.
The legislation, which also includes changes to health insurance rules under the Affordable Care Act, would result in 8.6 million fewer Americans having health care coverage a decade from now, per the CBO analysis. Republican committee aides disputed the CBO analysis but did not provide a separate estimate of the bill’s impacts.
The Medicaid changes are a crucial part of a broader bill that will boost border security and defense spending while permanently entrenching temporary tax cuts Trump enacted in his first term. Republican leaders hope to offset part of the cost of the tax cuts, which especially benefit higher income Americans, through lower spending on health care and food benefits for lower earners.
The Freedom Caucus freaks are screaming that it’s not enough. The swing state shape shifters are wringing their hands. There’s so much in this bill that’s terrible I wonder if they’ll be able to do anything but raise the debt ceiling and pass another supplemental. Trump’s demand for one Big Beautiful Bill (he forced them to actually name it that) has them in a corner.
Dave Dayen at The American Prospect writes:
I said back then that one-bill agendas tended to fail, because they offer plentiful targets for opposition and maddening coalitional choices that typically leave everyone bruised and upset. “Each day without a legislative accomplishment will both grate on the president and amp up the discord,” I wrote. “The one-bill strategy heightens the possibility of getting nothing done, or at least the possibility of scaling back ambitions and only getting a fraction passed.”
Fortunately, Republicans didn’t listen to me. And now they are in their familiar stage of recriminations, anger, and desperation, which is already leading to scaling back ambitions and only getting a fraction passed. […]
The truly incredible thing now being whispered in the Capitol is that they give up on the big beautiful bill entirely, and try just to extend the Trump tax cuts in a deal with Democrats at the end of the year. To go back to something else I wrote, this one in February, that Republicans would fail to get together on tax cuts, something so simple and fundamental to their perspective, is both unthinkable yet totally predictable. This is a caucus with no legislative accomplishments or track record, with huge differences of opinion, and with an allergy to compromise. Which exactly explains where we are today.
Read the whole thing to get a fuller picture of the dynamics. I’ll be surprised if they can get anything done.