The battle is here: GOP health care cuts and tax giveaways to the rich

Our fight against this moral abomination is our chance to show voters we’re on their side

Sign from protest outside Senator Ron Johnson’s office earlier this year. Source here.

Okay, so: Should we cut health care to fund tax giveaways to the rich?

Ask voters what they think about that idea, and they’re not shy: they hate it.

Ask Republicans in Congress and Trump’s White House, and you find out it’s been their goal all along.

A poll of voters in battleground House districts found 68% opposed cutting Medicaid in order to pay for tax cuts. 22% supported the idea. But the plan is barreling forward.

If you’re one of the 68% opposed to Medicaid cuts—especially if you’re represented by Republicans in Congress—now is the time to get loud.

First, take a second to learn what the GOP is proposing, and why it’s bad.

• One GOP idea is to charge poor people more for their health care.

• Another GOP is to reduce federal support for Medicaid expansion—which would kick 5.5 million people off their coverage, per the Congressional Budget Office.

• Another Republican bright idea: make it harder to enroll in Medicaid. That would lead to 2.3 million people losing their benefits.

That’s just a partial list of the GOP’s terrible ideas—there are many more, each of them rancid. Their proposals kill jobs, hurt the economy, make the lives of the poorest even harder, and worse. If passed, these Republican attacks on health care would cut short tens of thousands of Americans’ lives.

This is not a game.

Why cut Medicaid? The GOP’s goal is to find $880 billion to help pay for a giant tax cut for the ultra-wealthy that is the Republican Party’s number one policy priority.

This isn’t a surprise. During the last GOP trifecta, their first big bill attempted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. We defeated it. The second was the gigantic tax cut for the ultra-rich, which passed—and blew a hole in the federal budget.

Cutting Medicaid to make way for tax cuts for the rich is the oligarchy in action.

But we don’t have to let it happen.

Here’s your to-do list.

First, make some phone calls. 5Calls.org makes it easy. This page has facts about the Medicaid fight, a call script, and a handy tool for calling your legislators.

Make those calls, and put a reminder in your phone to do it every weekday.

Next, think about who you know who might care enough about this to take action—and send this along to them, or drop them a text, or make another call to ask if they’d be up for joining you.

Voila. You’re an advocate and an organizer.

Then, get involved with a group organizing protests on the ground. There are a ton. Sign up with some organizations like MoveOn, Indivisible, and disability rights groups to get alerts.

And one last thing: let’s recommit to ensuring that these extremists lose their MAGA majorities in 2026.

We should be talking about expanding health coverage and bringing costs down, not slashing it and driving costs up.

These are shared goals by pretty much every Democrat in public life. For example: all those ideas are right there in Governor Evers budget proposal—as they have been each year in office.

Republicans, led by Robin Vos, are poised to once again slash these programs from the budget this year. But once we win Wisconsin blue trifecta in 2026, we can make Governor Evers’ proposal a reality in the Badger State in 2027.

At a federal level, Democrats are united on this as well. Every single Democrat will vote against the GOP’s health care cuts and tax giveaways to the wealthy. As Leader Jeffries—joined by every House Democrat—has proclaimed for months the GOP budget plan will not get “a single Democratic vote.” Senate Democrats are in formation as well: they’re a unified wall of opposition to the oligarchic attack on working people and the poor. If you want to explain the difference between the two parties to someone who only casually pays attention to politics, this is a pretty good place to start. And to their credit, Democrats in both chambers, the DNC, and Democratic electeds and activists in the states are doing everything in their power to fight this atrocious policy—in ways that voters will see.

Our collective goal is to stop these cuts from passing, this year or next. After that, the most powerful way to fight back is by winning elections. When we flip the House in 2026—including newly blue seats from Wisconsin—we can make these GOP assaults on Medicaid a relic of history, not a daily nightmare.

And when we win a federal trifecta in 2028, we can move forward with the vision that every single Democratic presidency has worked to advance, step by (often painfully incremental) step.

We can do the work to ensure that every American has the health care that every human being deserves, as a right rather than a privilege, without costs that force working people to choose between medicine and food.

Once we win that trifecta and make those changes, we’ll wonder how it took so long. But now, we must prevent the GOP’s demolition of millions of Americans’ coverage—and exact the greatest possible political price on those attempting a reverse Robin Hood theft from the poor to enrich the already rich.

Fighting a fight like this, win or lose, is the right thing to do. And it shows voters whose side we’re on—theirs. Taking this fight to the public can show everyone who the GOP really works for.

This is a battle line where the vast majority of the country is with us on one side, and MAGA is on the other. Let’s fight with confidence, pride, and the ferocity that the stakes require.

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A version of this piece first appeared on Daily Kos.