MAGA Mike’s Medicaid Massacre— Cut, Lie, Repeat: The Big Ugly Medicaid Con

GOP Plans To Gut Medicaid— & Hope Enough People Are Glued To Fox To Not Notice

MAGA Mike (R-NY) + MAGA Mike (R-LA) and their plot to kill Medicaid

MAGA Mike, like Trump, consistently lies— at least in public— about the damage the Big Ugly Bill will do to the healthcare of over ten million Americans. The GOP false talking point: “We are not cutting Medicaid. The president has said that and I have said that. We're all said that. We're strengthening the program.” When there are no microphones around, though, the Speaker is hysterical about the horribly shredded safety net the GOP is offering up. Johnson “is warning in private that Senate Republicans could cost House Republicans their majority next year if they try to push through the deep Medicaid cuts in the current Senate version. That comes as Sen. Thom Tillis cautions GOP senators that those same cutbacks could become a political albatross for Republicans just as the Affordable Care Act was for Democrats.”

House Republicans are getting ready for lots of TV ads like this one that constituents of Mariannette Miller Meeks in Davenport, Burlington, Iowa City, Indianola and Muscatine are already seeing: 

Independent pro-healthcare group Unrig the Economy is doing a great job and the Central Valley’s New Deal Democrat Randy Villegas would love them to do one just like it spotlighting local Trump ally David Valadao. “No show Valadao,” he told us this morning, “voted to gut Medicaid, SNAP and WIC, in order to give billionaires a tax break. He's also too much of a coward to defend this betrayal of a vote in person and even canceled his last tele-town hall. While he tries to rip Healthcare away from our communities, we see that his true loyalty is to billionaires and his corporate sponsors.” Out with Valadao— in with Villegas!

Wisconsin progressive New Deal Democrat Randy Bryce told us that “In an interview Lyin’ Bryan Steal claimed that nowhere in the big ugly bill was ‘social security’ mentioned. Hey buddy, that’s like talking about robbing a bank without mentioning money. Please take a seat. Let’s also remember the promise to your 100 year old sweet meemaw. Want to help Randy replace Lyin’ Bryan? Brand new today.

The duplicity is textbook Republican politics: lie to the public, scheme over reality behind closed doors and pray the donors are watching more closely than the voters. The Big Ugly Bill is a grotesque budgetary monstrosity that doesn’t just “trim” Medicaid for millions of families as much as guts it. We’re talking about tens of billions in cuts that will push millions of children, low-income seniors, and disabled Americans off their coverage. The GOP knows this. They know the numbers. And they know exactly how many of their constituents will lose access to cancer treatments, mental health care, dialysis and access to hospitals, ironically, especially in the rural areas that back Republicans. They just hope Fox News won't tell them.

It’s not any kind of cohesive policy agenda— other than cruelty with a spreadsheet. Republicans love to talk about “personal responsibility,” but there’s nothing responsible about letting a pregnant woman in Mississippi lose prenatal care, or a child in Appalachia get dropped from coverage because their parents didn’t fill out the right paperwork on time. There’s no fiscal virtue in denying Alzheimer’s patients a bed in a Medicaid-funded nursing home. What the Big Ugly really does is convert Republican ideology into a death sentence for the poor and vulnerable— then wrap it in Orwellian spin about “strengthening the program.” It’s barbarism by budget line. Remember when they used to always squawk about Obamacare “death panels?” 

The cuts aren’t even turning out to be subtle. It looks like the Senate bill will move to cap federal Medicaid spending through block grants and per capita limits, ending the program’s foundational guarantee that the government will cover costs as they rise. It’s a backdoor dismantling of Medicaid as an entitlement. The bill also resurrects unreasonable work requirements, a failed and punitive policy that mostly kicks struggling people off the rolls without increasing employment. Add to that new eligibility red tape and funding caps for expansion states, and you get a system engineered to shrink. The GOP isn’t fixing Medicaid, just rigging it to fail, then preparing to blame the people who suffer when it does.

MAGA Mike and the Republicans should be panicking. Because while they’re whispering warnings in Capitol cloakrooms, voters are screaming bloody murder at town halls. Just ask the GOP survivors of 2018, when healthcare backlash nearly wiped them out. This time it’s Medicaid—one of the most popular, life-saving programs in the country. And guess what? Many of the people they’re targeting with these cuts are seniors, rural voters, working-class families—the very base MAGA Republicans pretend to fight for. If they jam this through, the Big Ugly might not just shred the safety net—it could take their House majority down with it.

Mike Sacks reminds us that there’s another MAGA Mike— one close to the Louisiana one but native to the Hudson Valley— aka Mike Lawler, who “made his name spending tons of money on TV ads built on lies, fear, and distortions. And now his buddies at the right-wing dark money American Action Network are out with an ad here in the district trying to scare seniors into supporting him when he was just the deciding vote to trigger $500 Billion in Medicare cuts as part of Trump's cruel, nonsense budget. It's exactly the kind of thing SNL satired in the 1990s with its fake ad frightening seniors into buying insurance against robot attacks— and it would be just as funny if the damage Lawler's doing wasn't so real and serious.”

Let’s help Mike Sacks, replace Mike Lawler in Congress— here. And while you’re at it, Lukas Ventouras can use some grassroots helping replacing Suffolk County MAGA Nick LaLota. “Even though a third of the county that Nick LaLota represents lives below the poverty line, he is hell bent on making their situation worse. By cutting Medicare and Medicaid, he is stripping Suffolk residents of a crucial lifeline in their pursuit of getting by, and attempting to live with dignity. I, for one, am absolutely sick and tired of Nick LaLota's ‘everyman’ schtick. He cannot be allowed to get away with branding himself as a friend of the common man, when he guts our social safety net to fund tax cuts for the super wealthy. Anyone who sells out their constituents for the super rich, the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, does not deserve the awesome responsibility of representing Suffolk's amazing citizenry in Congress. Nick LaLota doesn't care if the disabled don't receive adequate care. Nick LaLota doesn't care if the elderly cant afford their medication, and have to choose between paying for medicine or eating. Nick LaLota doesn't care about mothers and fathers going hungry, because they cannot afford to feed the whole family while managing medical bills. Nick LaLota doesn't care if you incur bankruptcy due to medical debt. Nick LaLota doesn't care about you, but I do. Together we will kick him from office, and return integrity, honesty, and hard work to this congressional district.”