Medicaid, Schmedicaid!

Well, we all are going to die

“Our life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.”
—Joan of Arc, burned at the stake by the English at the age of 19 due to blaspheming by wearing men's clothes, acting upon visions that were demonic, and refusing to submit her words and deeds to the judgment of the church.

"Well, we all are going to die. For heaven's sakes, folks.” —Joni Ernst

Rolling Stone reports that *rump‘s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, alleged without evidence that “no one will lose [Medicaid] coverage as a result” of the House’s proposed budget. House Speaker Mike Johnson similarly claimed “People will not lose their Medicaid unless they choose to do so.”

On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Johnson doubled down with, “There are no Medicaid cuts in the big, beautiful bill. We’re not cutting Medicaid.” He falsely said that losing Medicaid would be a personal choice, rather than one forced upon people by a few hundred of the most powerful legislators in the U.S.

Johnson further lied and said that those who would lose coverage are just “complaining” because people “are going to lose their coverage because they can’t fulfill the paperwork.” He suggested that those afraid of losing coverage simply get a job to gain their coverage back — promoting disinformation about how the program works while condescending to struggling Americans who will lose coverage under the system’s increasingly thorny requirements.

Truthout reports that what Johnson ignores is that the majority of people on Medicaid already work and qualify for benefits based on low income levels. Meanwhile, those without jobs who qualify are often people who can’t work or meet the requirements, with family obligations, with disabilities or in school.

Citing two states that have implemented similar work requirements on Medicaid recipients to those proposed in the GOP bill, Jennifer Tolbert, deputy director of the Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured and the director of State Health Policy and Data at Kaiser Family Foundation, said on PBS, “These new rules pose barriers to people enrolling in coverage and lead to coverage loss. And this is loss of coverage among people who are eligible for the requirements, but who have difficulty navigating the reporting requirements and providing the documentation needed to verify that they in fact meet the requirement.”

Speaking of condescending, Joni Ernst (R-IA) talked down to folks in her town hall last week where many of the attendees were peppering her with proposed cuts to social safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP. When someone in the crowd shouted out, "People are going to die,” she responded with "Well, we all are going to die. For heaven's sakes, folks.”

In response to her own remarks, she doubles down with this, rambling about the Tooth Fairy and embracing her lord and savior Jesus Christ. I can’t even…this is an elected official, folks.

As HCR writes, Ernst blamed the “hysteria that’s out there coming from the left” for the outcry over her comments. Like other Republicans, she claims that the proposed cuts of more than $700 billion in Medicaid funding over the next ten years is designed only to get rid of the waste and fraud in the program. Thus, they say, they are actually strengthening Medicaid for those who need it.

She goes on to write that Linda Qiu from the NYTs reports that most of the bill’s provisions have little to do with the “waste, fraud, and abuse” Republicans talk about. They target Medicaid expansion, cut the ability of states to finance Medicaid, force states to drop coverage, and limit access to care. And the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says the cuts mean more than 10.3 million Americans will lose health care coverage.

House speaker Mike Johnson has claimed that those losing coverage will be 1.4 million unauthorized immigrants, but this is false. As Qiu notes, although 14 states use their own funds to provide health insurance for undocumented immigrant children, and seven of those states provide some coverage for undocumented pregnant women, in fact, “unauthorized immigrants are not eligible for federally funded Medicaid, except in emergency situations.” Instead, the bill pressures those fourteen states to drop undocumented coverage by reducing their federal Medicaid funding.

As Alt National Park says, this bill isn’t about savings. It’s about stripping healthcare, ballooning the deficit, and blaming immigrants for it.

In a bit of good news Democratic state Rep. J.D. Scholten — who has been publicly flirting with a run against the GOP incumbent — decided to launch his campaign.

Scholten said, “We’re taking them off [Medicaid], so billionaires can have a second yacht, so they can have a bigger tax break. We have a system that’s geared towards and favors billionaires and huge multinational corporations, and that’s not working for most of Iowa.”

Let us hope the people of Iowa awake from their slumber, realizing they’ve been had, and vote blue in 2026.

And now…