I’ve been doing some reading, and I have questions.
House Speaker Mike Johnson stood up in front of cameras and said Medicaid is “for single mothers with two small children who is just trying to make it,” and “not for 29-year-old males sitting on their couches playing video games.” Well, I am a single mother with two small children. Or rather, I’m a mother of four, and I’ve been on Medicaid, and I’ve sat in those waiting rooms, and I’ve talked to the other moms there. And let me tell you something, Mr. Speaker: the people in those rooms are not 29-year-old gamers. They are tired parents holding sick babies at 7 a.m. They are home health aides. They are the woman who watches your kids so you can go to work.
Two-thirds of Medicaid recipients already have jobs. The ones who don’t are caregiving for a sick parent, dealing with a disability, or they can’t find work. But Republicans don’t want you to know that. They want you picturing some guy on a couch with a controller so you don’t notice what they’re actually doing.
Here’s what they’re actually doing. Their “big, beautiful bill” includes the biggest rollback of the social safety net in a generation. The White House put out a fact sheet claiming it “protects Medicaid for the truly vulnerable” and removes “illegal aliens.” Undocumented immigrants are already ineligible for Medicaid. They made that up. They looked you in the eye and told you a thing that is not true, because they think you won’t check.
I checked.
Office of Speaker Mike Johnson (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsThe nonpartisan Budget Lab at Yale ran the numbers. The bottom 20% of Americans, the people who are barely making it, will lose about $700 a year. The top 1% will gain about $30,000. That is not reform. That is a transfer. They are taking money from the family trying to buy groceries and handing it to the person who already has three houses.
Rep. Lauren Boebert backed up Johnson’s line: “If you are able to work in America, well then you should not be sitting at home playing video games and collecting a check.” Lauren Boebert, who has had her own share of public spectacle, is lecturing working people about responsibility. I don’t even know what to do with that except laugh, except it’s not funny.
And while they’re busy inventing a welfare gamer who doesn’t exist, Rep. Frank Pallone posted that Americans are being shot in broad daylight in Minnesota and detained without cause in New Jersey. He named Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, two Americans whose lives were taken amid what he called the lawlessness of Trump’s ICE and DHS. The Republican Party that spent decades calling itself the guardian of law and order has gone quiet. Crickets. Not a peep from the party that used to put “Back the Blue” on everything.
I remember when Republicans at least pretended to believe in something. The Democracy Journal piece I read put it plainly: they’ve gone from governing badly to not governing at all. They don’t have a plan. They have a slogan and a scapegoat. The slogan is “waste, fraud, and abuse.” The scapegoat is whoever you’re mad at this week.
I’m a mom. I manage a household budget. I know what it looks like when somebody is cooking the books. And this bill is cooked. You don’t help families by taking away their health insurance. You don’t protect the vulnerable by cutting the program that keeps them alive. And you don’t get to call yourself the party of law and order while people are getting shot in the street and your response is to hand more money to the agencies pulling people off sidewalks.
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsI did my own research. I read the bill summaries. I read the Yale analysis. I read what Mike Johnson said and what the White House claimed. And I’m here to tell you: they think you’re too busy or too trusting to notice what they’re doing. Prove them wrong.
Call your representative. Show up at the town hall. Ask the questions. Because nobody else is going to ask them for you.