Republicans Push Drastic Cuts to Medicaid & Food Aid While Proposing Tax Cuts for Rich
By Donna February 19, 2025 3:43 pm Category: Health (5.0 from 1 vote)
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Throughout the rest of the free world, healthcare is guaranteed for everyone regardless of income. That has never been true for the U.S., but now, the Trump/Musk-led GOP wants to make that very bad situation magnitudes worse.
These people are downright evil.
From today's Democracy Now!:
There are 72 million people in the United States that get health coverage through Medicaid. And there are many proposals moving through Congress that would take coverage away from potentially millions of people, leaving them without coverage.
And I want to drill down for just a moment on what it means to be without health coverage. When Medicaid is taken away, what does that mean? It means a parent who can’t get cancer treatment. It means a young adult, just starting out, who can’t get insulin to control their diabetes, just absolutely essential for them to be able to work and move up the economic ladder. It means older adults and people with disabilities losing the care they get in their homes so that they don’t have to move into nursing homes and institutions. It means workers who can’t get access to mental health treatment.
Medicaid provides lifesaving care and access to coverage that is both primary care and acute care. It helps people control chronic diseases, and it helps them thrive. And so, when you hear all the numbers and the hundreds of billions of dollars that are being proposed to be cut, the tens of millions of people that could lose coverage, it’s important to remember what that means to an individual and to their family...
So, in 2017, massive tax cuts were enacted. Those tax cuts were very expensive, and they were highly skewed towards wealthy people and profitable corporations. Many of those tax cuts, particularly the tax cuts that relate to individual people and some business tax cuts, are due to expire at the end of this year. And Republicans in Congress are trying to put forward a budget plan that, overall, would not only extend those tax cuts, but make them larger. And to offset some of the costs, they’re pointing to making massive cuts in things like health coverage and food assistance for some of our lowest-income households in the country.
The cuts they are proposing in Medicaid and food assistance equals the cuts — the tax cuts that they want to make or extend for the people in the top 1% of income. So, there is a direct link between their desire to extend very expensive tax cuts for very wealthy people and the cuts they are putting on the table that will take health coverage and food assistance away from people that struggle to afford the basics. Just to give you a little bit of a sense of how discordant this is, households in the top 1% of the income distribution have incomes of more than $740,000. The tax cut alone for those folks would average $62,000, which is more than the entire income of most people that benefit from Medicaid and from food assistance through the SNAP program. That is how imbalanced this agenda is.
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Speaking from our own experience, Ponderer and I wouldn't have been able to afford healthcare coverage had it not been for the subsidy we received from the Medicaid expansion that was part of the ACA, which will probably be shut down now.
I was going to remark that I don't know how these Republicans can sleep at night, but if you don't have a conscience, then I guess that that's not a problem.
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