WASHINGTON — In their zeal to deliver a big win to President Donald Trump by passing his sweeping tax and spending bill, Republicans have been coming up with ridiculous ways to defend their plan to strip health care from an estimated 11 million low-income people.
Experts don’t matter. Prove you are worthy of health care. We’re all going to die anyway. Somehow, these are actual arguments GOP lawmakers and officials have been making as they try to gloss over the pain their bill would impose on poor people and families while handing big tax breaks to mostly rich people.
Here are five of the most absurd ways Republicans have tried to defend their so-called Big Beautiful Bill, which guts federal health and food assistance programs by nearly $1.3 trillion.
We’re all going to die anyway.
It was her first town hall of the year, held at 7:30 in the morning at a rural area two hours away from Des Moines — possibly to keep national attention off the senator as much as possible. Yet Republican Sen. Joni Erst of Iowa last week still managed to step in it with a flippant remark to a woman concerned about Republican plans to cut Medicaid.
“People will die!” the woman shouted at the senator.
“Well, we all are going to die,” Ernst responded with a smirk. “For heaven’s sakes, folks.”
The glib comment quickly went viral on social media and Democrats pounced on her words, featuring them on signs at press conferences around the U.S. Capitol this week as they blasted the GOP tax and spending bill. It even spurred Democratic state Rep. JD Scholten to announce his entry into the race to unseat Ernst, who faces reelection next year, and election handicappers to shift the race slightly toward Democrats.
Ernst later doubled down by filming a sarcastic apology video from a cemetery. “I’m very compassionate,” she told a swarm of reporters this week.
Losing health care coverage is actually healthy.
From the minute Republicans started drafting the legislation this year, they knew two things: They would limit eligibility for the childless adults without disabilities covered under the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, saving hundreds of billions of dollars, and they would deny that the significant loss of coverage resulting from “work requirements” — which would mostly kick people who have jobs off Medicaid by imposing new paperwork burdens on them — counted as a cut.
In fact, as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) explained in February, losing health care coverage would spur people to improve themselves, and they’d be better off for it.
“Work is good for you. You find dignity in work. And the people that are not doing that, we’re going to try to get their attention,” Johnson said. “So everyone needs to take a deep sigh of relief and understand that we’re not going to harm any Americans with this. What we’re doing is the right thing by the people.”
The Congressional Budget Office said this week the proposed work requirements — better understood as a limit on benefits for people who don’t prove to their state government they’ve participated in 80 hours per month of qualifying “community engagement” activities — would reduce Medicaid enrollment by 5.2 million and save $344 billion over a decade. Ultimately, 4.8 million fewer people would have insurance in 2034.
This week, Johnson’s office pointed to a new analysis by the conservative American Enterprise Institute finding that unemployed Medicaid recipients who would be affected by the law typically spend 4.2 hours per day watching TV and playing video games, compared with 2.7 hours per day of TV and video games for Medicaid recipients with jobs. For Republicans, unemployed gamers are about as deserving of government assistance as undocumented immigrants, who are also targeted in the legislation.
“The next time a Democrat makes false claims about ‘Medicaid cuts,’ just remember that what they’re really saying is they want illegal aliens and able-bodied adults playing video games at home to continue stealing resources from those who need it,” Johnson’s office said in a statement.
In a major analysis of work requirements that have been tried in various federal programs, however, the CBO found in 2022 that booting unemployed people off Medicaid didn’t boost their employment. The budget office pointed to what happened when the first Trump administration let Arkansas implement a Medicaid work requirement in 2018.
“There, many of the targeted adults lost their health insurance as a result of the work requirement,” the CBO said. “Employment did not appear to increase, although the evidence is scant. Research indicates that many participants were unaware of the work requirement or found it too onerous to demonstrate compliance.”
Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), lead author of the Republicans’ Medicaid proposal, has said lawmakers learned from the Arkansas example and that the compliance paperwork in this case would be less onerous.
Don’t believe the experts.
GOP lawmakers have sought to undermine the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan federal agency that analyzes the fiscal effects of legislation, after it estimated that the massive tax cut package will add $2.4 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years and eliminate health insurance for nearly 11 million people.
Republicans have argued that these tax cuts will spur economic growth and eventually pay for themselves, something that studies have shown did not happen after they made similar arguments about their 2017 tax cut bill. They also have a very vocal critic to contend with in billionaire Elon Musk, their one-time ally who has savaged the bill as an “abomination” for how it will balloon the deficit.
Appearing Thursday on CNN, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) also dismissed the CBO’s projections about the nearly 11 million people who stand to lose their health care coverage.
“Can you say for certain no one will lose their health insurance?” CNN anchor Pamela Brown asked Scott.
“You just can’t look at those numbers at face value and say they’re going to happen,” Scott responded.
People will find jobs eventually.
Republicans who are willing to at least acknowledge that cutting Medicaid will lead to people losing health insurance argue that they will instead be able to find a job and receive employer-sponsored health care.
“People are screaming and saying, ‘Hey, it’s kicking people off Medicaid.’ It’s not kicking people off Medicaid,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said in an interview with CNBC. “It’s transitioning from Medicaid to employer-provided health care. So, yes, we’ve got 10 million people that are not gonna be on Medicaid, but they then are gonna be on employer-provided health care.”
That’s an extremely optimistic prediction, especially since the GOP bill doesn’t explicitly create any jobs itself. Even if those people who lose their Medicaid coverage are able to find a job at some point, not every employer offers health care, particularly for part-time roles.
“Few of those disenrolled from Medicaid because of the policy would have access to and enroll in employment-based coverage and none would be eligible for the premium tax credit,” CBO Director Phillip Swagel said in a letter to members of Congress on Wednesday.
Prove you deserve care.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the former TV personality now running the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said people should have to “prove that you matter” to get Medicaid coverage.
During a Wednesday interview on Fox Business, Oz defended the bill’s harsh, new work requirements for Medicaid. The bill requires states to deny coverage to people age 19 to 64 applying for Medicaid if they’re not already working at least 80 hours a month. It also requires states to kick people off Medicaid if they can’t prove they’re meeting the work requirements. The Congressional Budget Office estimates these work requirements alone will result in 5.2 million people losing their health coverage.
“We’re asking that able-bodied individuals who are able to go back to work at least try to get a job or volunteer or take care of a loved one who needs help or go back into school,” Oz said. “Do something that shows you have agency over your future.”
If people aren’t doing those things, he said, they’ll have to get a job and get health insurance there because they shouldn’t be covered by Medicaid anymore.
“Go out there. Do entry-level jobs. Get into the workforce. Prove that you matter,” Oz said. “Get agency into your own life.”
In fact, under the GOP bill, most people are projected to lose Medicaid coverage due to red tape, with states not automatically exempting certain people from work requirements who should be exempted. At least 2 in 3 enrollees would be kicked off Medicaid despite working or qualifying for an exemption, like having a disability or going to school, per the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.