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The Big Beautiful Bill is turning into a big beautiful headache for Republicans. Senate Republicans are trying to achieve cost savings with even steeper changes and cuts to Medicaid than the House. Besides causing a rebellion among some Senate Republicans that they are trying to offset with a rinky-dink rural hospital fund that won’t accomplish anything to help the people who will lose their health insurance, Democrats have successfully branded and defined this legislation as taking food and healthcare away to give tax cuts to billionaires.
Speaker Mike Johnson has set many fires for himself by trying to push what increasingly looks like a doomed piece of legislation, and now he is worried that the Senate version of this bill could cost Republicans the House.
Politico reported:
Speaker Mike 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, according to three people granted anonymity to describe the matter.
That comes as Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) cautions GOP senators that those same cutbacks could become a political albatross for Republicans just as the Affordable Care Act was for Democrats.
“[Barack] Obama said … ‘if you like your health care you can keep it, if you like your doctor we can keep it,’ and yet we had several million people lose their health care,” the in-cycle senator told reporters Tuesday. “Here we’re saying [with] Medicaid, we’re going to hold people harmless, but we’re estimating” millions of people could lose coverage.
What Sen. Tillis left out of his Obamacare example is that those who lost their plans did so because those plans were garbage that did not meet the minimum coverage standards. Those people who lost their plans, as well as tens of millions of other Americans who didn’t lose their plans, were able to get better and more affordable coverage under the ACA.
The Republican plan is to throw millions of people off of Medicaid and the ACA, with no option to get better and more affordable coverage.
That is why the Medicaid cuts are an anchor around the necks of House and Senate Republicans.
It is very clear that the Senate version of the tax cut bill for the rich can’t pass the House.
Mike Johnson’s suggestion that Republicans could lose the House due to these cuts is a glimmer of reality, as the nation is watching a political party vote itself out of power.
