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GOP Cuts to Medicaid 'Will Kill People,' Advocate Warns and New Research Bolsters
A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that Medicaid expansion saved over 27,000 lives since 2010.
May 16, 2025
Critics who say extensive cuts to Medicaid being pushed by the Trump administration and House Republicans will result in the deaths of people were bolstered Friday by new reporting on a recent study detailing how the key health program for the nation's poor saves lives.
As Republicans in Congress pressed ahead this week with a plan that would cause at least 8 million Americans to lose Medicaid as part of a sweeping tax and spending bill desired by U.S. President Donald Trump, a recently published working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, first reported on by The New York Times, shows that Medicaid expansion saved over 27,000 lives since 2010.
A provision in the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which went into effect in 2014, allowed states to expand eligibility for Medicaid to all low-income adults regardless of disability or parenthood status. The change is part of the reason that enrollment in the program rose roughly 50% between 2010 and 2021, according to the authors of the study.
The study, which used a dataset of 37 million low-income American adults, found that expansions increased Medicaid enrollment by 12 percentage points. The study estimates that people who enrolled in Medicaid were 21% less likely to die compared to those not enrolled.
"These expansions appear to be cost-effective, with direct budgetary costs of $5.4 million per life saved and $179,000 per life-year," according to a summary of the working paper.
The researchers told the Times that the timing of the release of the working paper was not connected to Congress' current conversation around Medicaid, though they told the outlet that the debate made their findings especially relevant.
The Times described the research as "the most definitive study yet" on Medicaid's health effects and health economists not involved with the research described it as the most persuasive proof so far that Medicaid and other types of health insurance save lives.
Meanwhile, on Friday, efforts to pass the GOP megabill hit a stumbling block when a handful of Republican so-called "fiscal hawks" voted with Democrats on the U.S. House Budget Committee to block the reconciliation package from advancing through a key committee vote. The Republican hardliners voted no because they want more cuts to Medicaid.
After the vote, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a panel member, vowed that Democrats would "keep fighting to protect Medicaid and the American people."
In response to the House Budget Committee vote, Alex Lawson, executive director of the advocacy group Social Security Works said on Friday: "Make no mistake, Republicans still plan to bring it to the House floor next week."
Lawson blasted the proposed Medicaid cuts, writing that "their plan will kill people."
"The ripple effect of these cuts will hit every single person in this country," he added. "Unless you are a billionaire, your standard of living and your health care will get worse if this despicable plan becomes law."
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Ready to Punish the Poor in Their Districts, 7 Out of 10 GOP Lawmakers Set to Benefit From Trump Tax Scam
"Put simply: at a time when costs continue to rise for everyday Americans, this tax day, Congressional Republicans aren't focused on making their constituents' lives better," said one watchdog.
Apr 15, 2025
To honor Tax Day, a watchdog group is highlighting research showing how 70% of congressional Republicans may see personal financial benefit from the party's tax plan, now making its way through Congress, which would likely be paid for in part by deep cuts to Medicaid and through cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
According to Accountable.US, a progressive research and advocacy group, "270,000 households in many of the lowest-income Republican congressional districts could lose SNAP benefits while their representatives potentially save millions."
"While millions prepare their returns, the Trump administration and their lackeys in Congress are eagerly seeking a way to rob their constituents of vital services and pay for tax giveaways to themselves, their billionaire donors, and mega corporations," Tony Carrk, the group's executive director, said in a statement Tuesday.
"Put simply: at a time when costs continue to rise for everyday Americans, this tax day, Congressional Republicans aren't focused on making their constituents' lives better; instead they’re focused on gutting programs Americans rely on and cutting taxes for those doing just fine."
As part of its spending and tax plan, Republicans are aiming to extend expiring provisions of Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a move that would disproportionately benefit the wealthy.
The provisions set to expire include a 20% deduction for "pass-through" businesses—whose owners report their share of profits as taxable income under the individual income tax—and the current estate tax exemption amount. If the estate tax TCJA exemption were to expire, the exemption would drop down to $7 million per individual, meaning more millionaires would be forced to pay federal estate tax.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D) also recently endorsed a full repeal of the estate tax, which is a tax applied to assets inherited by others when a wealthy person dies.
The pass-through deduction and estate tax are two benefits that are tilted toward the wealthy, according to Accountable.US, which focused on these two benefits when building their "Cash in Congress" database.
To compile the data, the group looked at lawmakers' most recent federal annual disclosure, and counted them within the 70% of lawmakers set to gain from the tax plan if they are set to benefit from the pass-through deduction.
Some lawmakers are also poised to benefit from keeping the TCJA estate tax exemption amount in place. According to Accountable.US, 18% of Republican House members and 28% of Senate Republicans are wealthy enough that they are currently subject to the estate tax. They would also pay even less in estate taxes if the provision was fully repealed.
Specifically, the 10 wealthiest House Republicans are threatening Medicaid access for 1.7 million of their own constituents, among the poorest in their districts, according to a statement from the group when they launched the database last week.
Accountable.US also highlights the situation of individual members who may benefit.
Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.) is a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is tasked with coming up with spending cuts that will likely impact Medicaid. Per Accountable.US, she could benefit from the repeal of the estate tax after reporting over $40 million in assets on her most recent annual financial disclosure.
Meanwhile, according to the group, her district has a median household income that is over 20,000 below the U.S. median household income, and 14.3% of adults have income below the poverty line. Over 35,000 of the households she represents receive SNAP benefits.
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How Will GOP Fight Back Against Political Fury Unleashed by Trump?
Two words: voter suppression. The Republican Party's recent actions make it clear that they will make it harder for regular folks to cast a ballot, by any means necessary.
Apr 12, 2025
It was the great Kris Kristofferson, whom we just lost last fall, who wrote that “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Is that what Trump meant by his “Liberation Day” of tariffs last week, which liberated America’s 401K investors of billions of dollars? At least millions of citizens felt the freedom to take to the streets over theweekend with their grievances, which should give all of us hope.
In an America that feels on edge right now, few things in the nation’s capital are more precarious than the GOP’s fragile hold on power in the U.S. House. The Republicans’ current 220-213 majority is one of the smallest in modern times. And with crucial votes just ahead on issues like President Donald Trump’s proposed tax cuts that favor billionaires and corporations, every vote counts.
Well, unless you’re one of 800,000 Texans who live in Houston or its adjacent Harris County suburbs.
Voters who live in the Lone Star State’s 18th Congressional District, which is nearly 76% Black and Latino, have received a series of gut punches, beginning last year when longtime incumbent and civil rights icon Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee died in office. The district then went strongly for another well-known local, Houston’s 70-year-old former mayor Sylvester Turner, giving him nearly 70% of the fall vote, even after his disclosure he was suffering from a rare form of bone cancer.
Sadly, Turner’s career as a U.S. congressman lasted less than 10 weeks. In late winter, the Houstonian fell ill and died on March 5. The intervening weeks — a momentous time back on Capitol Hill, including a budget vote carried by Republicans by a narrow margin — saw a large crowd come together for Turner’s funeral and candidates stepping forward to replace him.
What was missing for more than a month was any effort by Texas’ right-wing GOP Gov. Greg Abbott to call a special election to fill the vacant seat. Last week, as residents in the 18th grumbled and at least one Democratic hopeful — along with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — threatened to sue, Abbott finally spoke...
...not to call the election, but to say he was holding things up because of his ongoing complaints about how one of the few Democratic counties in a mostly red state conducts its elections. It is true that Harris County voters have experienced problems like long lines — often because of a lack of polling places and other restrictions imposed by the GOP-led statehouse. Meanwhile, Abbott cynically worked with state lawmakers to enact legislation that ousted one Democratic elections chief.
But Turner’s untimely death has given Abbott a MAGA two-fer: a chance to keep a safe Democratic seat vacant for as long as he can get away with it, and to stroke the Big Lie that any election that Republicans lose must involve voter fraud.
“Harris County is a repeat failure as it concerns operating elections,” Abbott insisted in a local interview. “Had I called that very quickly, it could have led to a failure in that election, just like Harris County has failed in other elections. They need to have adequate time to operate a fair and accurate election, not a crazy election like what they’ve conducted in the past.”
Monday night, as the impasse started getting more attention, Abbott did decide to declare a special election — not in June, when a statewide runoff is already scheduled, but during the Nov. 4 general election. That means citizens in and around Houston will go eight full months without a representative on Capitol Hill. It’s outrageous.
Abbott’s filibuster of giving Harris County a free, fair and prompt congressional election may offer an answer to the hottest burning question as spring 2025 dawns across the nation: How on earth do Republicans, who seem to be fueling a voter rebellion with Trump’s insane tariff scheme, consumer prices that are rising despite a campaign promise to bring them down, and the president’s popularity plunging, expect to win the 2026 midterms, let alone keep the White House in 2028?
The governor of America’s second-largest state just said the quiet part out loud: voter suppression.
If you spend too much time on social media, as I do, you frequently see liberals commenting on the next elections, only to add, “assuming we have an election.” It feels like extreme internet paranoia and in one sense it arguably is, because it’s impossible to imagine there won’t be balloting in 19 months.
Or, at least, something that resembles an election.
Although there may be few opportunities to as aggressively put a thumb on the scale of election fairness as Abbott is currently getting away with, it’s also becoming clear that Republicans — who’ve embraced anti-democratic tactics from closing polling places on college campuses to advocating for strict voter ID laws — are taking their war on voting to the next level.
Look no farther than North Carolina, where the Democratic candidate for the state’s Supreme Court, incumbent Associate Justice Allison Riggs, should have been sworn in for a full term months ago, after the 2024 results showed she’d defeated Republican Jefferson Griffin by a scant 734 votes.
The moral of the story should have been that every vote counts, but instead it has been that Republicans can’t accept defeat in a democratic election. After losing a recount, Team Griffin went into state court asking that a whopping 60,000 ballots get tossed out because of a complicated technicality in the way these voters had initially registered, even though they had presented valid IDs to vote as required by law.
A federal court had ruled against this challenge before the election, and the proposed massive disenfranchisement was rightfully called “ridiculous” by Charlotte Observer columnist Paige Masten, who added: “But it seems to be the Republican playbook these days: If at first you don’t succeed, just try to throw the votes out.”
The challenge has dragged out deep into 2025, until last week when Republican judges on the intermediate Court of Appeals powered a 2-1 ruling that stunned the Tarheel State by siding with Griffin’s argument, although most of the potentially disenfranchised voters were given three weeks to prove their identity and make their votes count. Still, the ruling — which Riggs is appealing to a Supreme Court where her colleagues are mostly Republican — could cancel out enough Democratic votes to change the outcome. It’s a grim reminder of what was expected from Team Trump if he’d lost last November, and a warning of what’s ahead.
These miscarriages of democracy in Texas and North Carolina come at the same time that Trump has signed an executive order — arguably not worth the piece of paper he scribbled his name across — with the goal of suppressing future votes.
The sweeping diktat signed by the president late last month demands that would-be voters produce proof of citizenship, seeks greater cooperation between the federal government and states on finding and removing ineligible voters, and also to leverage federal dollars to prevent mail-in ballots received after Election Day from being counted. The order has been panned by legal scholars, who note that such rules are typically set at the state level, and is already the subject of a lawsuit by 19 states.
Still, Trump and the GOP have laid down a marker for the 2026 election, and beyond. The party’s recent actions make it clear that they will make it harder for regular folks to cast a ballot, by any means necessary, including a new wave of voter ID laws, constant legal challenges, and maybe cancelling elections where they can. And any efforts to fight back, by Democrats or other aggrieved citizens, will trigger more Big Lies about election fraud.
The hole in the Republican strategy is that as Trump continues to set America on fire with his unhinged presidency, even extreme suppression can’t stop a tsunami at the ballot box.
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