House Republicans approved a budget Thursday, pushing Donald Trump’s dream bill closer to reality.
With the budget framework in the rearview, conservatives in both chambers are now squaring away how they can slice trillions of dollars from the details of the federal budget in order to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for corporations and billionaires, and make an estimated $6.8 trillion addition to the deficit more palatable to their base.
One much-discussed solution includes taking a metaphorical chain saw to indirectly strip $880 billion from Medicaid, but House Speaker Mike Johnson still wasn’t ready to admit the reality of that proposal Thursday—despite the fact that his colleagues have already publicly acknowledged the party’s intention to gut the low-income insurance program.
“No one has talked about cutting one benefit in Medicaid,” Johnson insisted, instead offering another solution to afford Trump’s tax cuts. “What we’ve talked about is returning work requirements, so for example you don’t have able-bodied young men on a program that’s designed for single mothers and the elderly and disabled.”
The eyebrow-raising pitch also came packaged with an insult for young American men, who Johnson argued were wasting their lives playing video games.
“They’re draining resources from people who actually do that,” the speaker continued. “So if you clean that up and shore it up you save a lot of money and you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be at work instead of playing video games all day.”
But Republican proposals to introduce a work requirement to Medicaid have thus far asked recipients to navigate work-reporting and verification systems on a monthly basis—a detail that would require significant federal funding. The plans would also negate coverage for individuals who find themselves temporarily unemployed, such as those who were recently fired or laid off.
A February report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that introducing work requirements to the insurance program could strip upward of 36 million Americans of their health coverage—half of Medicaid’s 72 million enrollees.
And, at the end of the day, if work requirements for Medicaid are actually intended to encourage employment—rather than punish the poor—then the whole effort is founded on a dud philosophy.
“Research shows that work requirements do not increase employment,” the think tank’s report said.
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