Republicans contending with the prospective damage of their Medicaid cuts have decided to simply brush off the protests of their constituents as “misinformation.”
Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee went back and forth Tuesday on who exactly would be affected if conservative lawmakers trudge forward with $880 billion in cuts to the public health insurance coverage. At one point, a wheelchair-bound protester identifying herself as from Youngstown, Ohio, interrupted Alabama Representative Gary Palmer to express her fears.
“You will kill me, I’m HIV-positive,” she shouted as security rolled her out. “I have survived on my meds that are $10,000 a month.”
“If you [got] all these cuts, how the hell would I be able to shop at your store?” she added.
But Palmer was unswayed, quickly throwing aside her plea for help.
“It’s unfortunate that people are so enraged by the misinformation that they’ve been given,” he said after the protester had been removed from the room. “It’s a commentary on this Congress and how we treat people.”
The Republican bill would kick 8.6 million Americans off Medicaid over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. (Republicans offered their own numbers, revealing shortly before the committee meeting was scheduled to begin that at least 7.6 million Americans would be affected.)
Republicans claim that the bulk of people who would be booted off the program include undocumented immigrants and non-disabled, jobless Americans. That could happen by way of adding a work requirement to Medicaid, which would ask 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, for instance those who were recently fired or laid off.
But critics of the Republican measure argue that eligible Medicaid recipients could get strung up in these increasingly frequent eligibility checks, potentially lapsing their coverage and benefits. 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.
Republicans have spent months attempting to pencil out an $880 billion cut to the program in order to extend Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for corporations and billionaires, in an effort to make the tax cuts’ estimated $6.8 trillion deficit hike more palatable to their base.
“Republicans are trying to say this is kind of a moderate bill,” Energy and Commerce Ranking Member Frank Pallone told reporters Monday. “Nothing could be further from the truth.
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