The attack on Medicaid to fund tax cuts for the rich is on the ropes… for the wrong reason

Ron Johnson says the health care cuts just aren’t brutal enough

Five House Republicans stall Trump’s “big beautiful” tax bill. Source here

The good news is that the GOP’s massive raid on health care in order to fund a multi-trillion-dollar tax cut for billionaires has hit rocky shoals—and, so far, doesn’t have the votes to pass.

The bad news is that, among Republicans—both in the House and in the Senate—the objectors think it doesn’t go far enough.

Ron Johnson is the worst of them.

Johnson is on a media tour describing the so-called “big, beautiful bill” as “the Titanic” because its cuts don’t go far enough.

So what is it that he thinks should be cut? As he wrote in an op-ed, he wants to target “ObamaCare, which seems to have found new life under the name ‘Medicaid expansion.’”

21 million Americans today have health insurance thanks to Medicaid expansion (which is, by the way, what it’s been called all along). The total number of people covered by the Affordable Care Act, including those on Medicaid expansion, is now 35 million.

That’s more than one in ten Americans.

But remember: Americans over 65 get Medicare. The expansion and ACA are critical programs focused on working-age adults, the folks who have kids. If you do the math, roughly one in three kids has a parent whose health insurance comes from the ACA or Medicaid expansion.

Imagine a public school classroom with 30 kids. If Ron Johnson got his way, ten kids in that class would have parents who lost their health care coverage.

These are families in red states as well as blue states; rural areas as well as urban areas; Republican voters as well as Democratic voters. But most importantly, they’re human beings.

The current bill would kick 8.6 million people off their health care, primarily via attacks on Medicaid, plus another 5.1 million by not renewing support for Affordable Care Act premiums that passed under Biden but will expire this year. That’s 13.7 million. Clearly not enough for Ron Johnson.

Johnson’s other idea is to “eliminate the hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse that the DOGE effort has shown exists.” But DOGE hasn’t actually found waste, fraud, and abuse—it’s just gutted programs that Americans rely on, such as cancer research, food quality inspections, the Social Security Administration, and, oh yes, the IRS’s capacity to audit wealthy tax cheats, which may or may not include some of Ron Johnson’s biggest campaign contributors.

This last one is the most galling. One estimate suggests that the deficit may grow by $500 billion due to the DOGE/Trump assault on the IRS. That’s $500 billion in one year.

So Johnson’s vision is to cut health care for the neediest and most vulnerable, cut taxes for the ultra-wealthy, and then cut the government’s ability to check whether the super-rich pay even those smaller tax bills. Got it.

Johnson isn’t alone. This morning, far-right extremists blocked the already-extreme Trump budget from passing through the House Budget Committee.

Now, the GOP will be looking for even more ways to be cruel in order to garner the votes from the right-wing defectors and push the bill to the House floor.

This is where the rest of us need to come in.

For battles like this, every day that the bill doesn’t move is a day we’ve won—and where we’ve increased the chance that we can win this fight.

The more the public finds out about what the Republicans are trying to do to them, in order to enrich their MAGA billionaire backers, the more outraged the American people will become.

The more outraged the public becomes, the more public opposition to this bill will coalesce.

The more public opposition, the greater the chance that Republican members of Congress from non-deep-red districts and states will want to avoid voting for the bill—because they will know it could cost them their jobs.

Derrick Van Orden in WI-03, for example, would face a choice between the end of his political career or a vote for a vicious piece of legislation that would kick his own constituents off their health coverage.

But if Republicans try to secure the votes of endangered Republicans by softening the bill’s extremism, they’ll lose the ultra-extremists like Ron Johnson, who already say it’s not cruel enough.

The GOP is divided. They’re in disarray. This is the time to press our case—for the good of the country.

Call them. Protest. Write. Be unignorable.

Democrats are entirely united in our opposition to this attack on our communities and our fundamental values. This is what our party is about: building a country that works for everyone, not just those who have everything.

Let’s keep fighting. Let’s win this thing. And then let’s win some elections.

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