Republicans are forcing through the president’s “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill despite opposition from within their party, and despite opposition from the American public.
While debating the details of the Medicaid-slashing tax cuts late Tuesday, Democratic Representative Jim McGovern pointed out that the lawmakers in the room were not elected to strip away public services from their constituents.
“I wasn’t sent here to vote for trash like this,” he charged.
The bill proposes $880 billion in Medicaid cuts in order to afford an extension to Donald Trump’s 2017 tax plan, which would overwhelmingly benefit multimillionaires and corporations.
“If I am understanding the numbers correctly, the latest version of their tax scam, the top 0.1 percent stand to gain $255,000 on average in 2027 alone,” McGovern said before the committee. “That is $700 a day every day.”
“The people who make over $1 million a year will also get their pockets lined. On average, these millionaires will have an additional $81,500 per year but pennies for everybody else,” the Massachusetts lawmaker continued. “For those earning less than $50,000 a year, the average benefit is $265, less than one dollar per day.”
“And that’s laughable when you begin to look at the gaps that are going to be created by these cuts in other programs,” he added.
The Republican bill would kick 8.6 million Americans off of Medicaid over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, though that number could be much larger considering some of the stipulations the GOP hopes to add to the program to limit eligibility, such as adding work requirements to the public health insurance program.
That could eventually strip upwards of 36 million Americans of their health coverage—half of Medicaid’s 72 million enrollees, according to a February report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which warned that eligible Medicaid recipients could get strung up in the bureaucracy of increasingly frequent eligibility checks, potentially lapsing coverage for individuals who are entitled to the benefit.
But tampering with the third rail of American politics comes at Trump’s behest, as his acolytes in Congress work to make an enormously expensive tax cut—that won’t add any noticeable benefit for the majority of Americans—more palatable to their base. Trump’s bill is estimated to add somewhere between $3.8 trillion and $5.3 trillion to the national debt.
“This is not a governing philosophy. It is a scam,” McGovern said. “For the life of me, I cannot understand why you are doing this. Why the hell did you choose a career of public service just to do this? Just to rip away the health care and food assistance and security of working and middle class Americans.”
“I don’t understand this, I don’t understand the cruelty,” McGovern added.
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