WASHINGTON – Negotiations continued in Congress as Republicans aimed to pass President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill.”
Democrats accused Republicans of slashing Medicaid to make way for tax cuts for the wealthy, but Republicans said all it does is root out fraud.
Republican Rep. Brett Guthrie, of Kentucky, was among the conservatives who argued that the bill’s cuts don’t go far enough to “stop the billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse in the Medicaid program.”
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley turned into Democrats’ most unexpected ally when he published “Don’t Cut Medicaid,” an op-ed in the New York Times.
“It is wrong to cut health care for the working poor,” Hawley said. “That’s what we’re talking about here with Medicaid.”
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that if the bill would turn into law it would slash more than $700 billion from the deficit in the next decade.
The cost: An estimated 10.3 million, including 5 million in Florida, will be losing Medicaid coverage by 2034 and 7.6 million will be uninsured nationwide.
Democrat Rep. Frederica Wilson said she opposes House Speaker Mike Johnson’s efforts to push the bill forward because it will cost Floridians’ lives.
“This cannot stand and we must protect Medicaid,” Wilson wrote on X.
The bill’s provisions on the programs for the poor include conditional work requirements that if not met would mean a denial of both Medicaid and Affordable Care Act plans.
“They rushed this cruel bill to markup in the dead of night without even understanding what they were voting on,” Democrat Rep. Jerry Nadler, of New York, wrote on X Wednesday morning.
Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced the bill to the House Budget Committee.
At the Capitol, Johnson told reporters that he aims for Memorial Day to pass the package to the Senate.
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