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healthcare
Millions Kicked Off Medicaid? 'Don't Eat Carrot Cake,' Says Administrator Oz
"Why don't you pry carrot cake out of my cold, dead hands and give us back Medicaid coverage for millions instead," replied Democratic Sen. Mark Warner.
Jul 14, 2025
U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz appeared on Fox Business on Monday, where he presented a carrot cake to celebrate Medicaid's 60th birthday and brushed aside concerns about the millions of Americans likely to lose their healthcare coverage under recently passed Republican legislation—by telling people to not eat carrot cake.
Oz—the multimillionaire erstwhile celebrity surgeon, purveyor of "miracle" cures, and failed U.S. Senate candidate—gave Fox Business host Stuart Varney what he called a "MAHA Medi-cake" before proceeding to extol the virtues of Medicaid, the program launched during then-President Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society" agenda that provides health insurance to more than 70 million lower-income Americans.
Medicaid "was a promise to the American people to take care of you if you are having problems financially or if you were having an issue because you're older and needed healthcare," Oz said. "And it changed the country in a good way for many reasons."
"But we're all in it together, Stuart," he added, "which means we'll be there for you, the American people, when you need help with Medicaid and Medicare, but you've got to stay healthy as well. Be healthy, do the most you can do to really live up to the potential, your God-given potential to live a full and healthy life, you know, don't eat carrot cake, eat real food."
17 million people are going to lose their health insurance because of the Trump administration.Dr. Oz's advice is “don’t eat carrot cake.”
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— Elizabeth Warren (@warren.senate.gov) July 14, 2025 at 10:17 AM
Social media users roundly ridiculed Oz's remarks, with criticism centered around the estimated 17 million people who will be left uninsured under the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Donald Trump earlier this month. The legislation contains the largest Medicaid cuts in history.
"Why don't you pry carrot cake out of my cold, dead hands and give us back Medicaid coverage for millions instead," Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) wrote on Bluesky.
Another Bluesky user wrote, "Carrot cake didn't give me cancer, dumbass."
Yet another said, "Um... your boss eats McDonald's every chance he gets and you are judging people eating carrot cake," a reference to Trump's legendary fondness for Big Macs, Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, and vanilla shakes.
Still another quipped, "First he came for my crudites, now my carrot cake."
"Carrot cake didn't give me cancer, dumbass."
Over on X, one account with over 130,000 followers said: "What an insensitive prick as he brings a piece of carrot cake to Stu Varney during the interview. Republicans seem so gleeful to be hurting Americans. This is why millionaires and billionaires should never be in Congress or the [White House]."
The Occupy Democrats X account also weighed in, posting, "It's not enough for them to take away our healthcare, Republicans want to blame us for getting sick."
"The idea that avoiding carrot cake in favor of healthier foods will somehow render Americans immune to health problems is insulting in the extreme," Occupy Democrats continued. "Rather than 'let them eat cake,' he's telling us 'do not eat cake,' but the sentiment is every bit as out of touch as Marie Antoinette's apocryphal quote."
"MAHA stands for 'Make America Healthy Again,' an Orwellian phrase deployed by an administration that is actively making Americans sicker by stripping away their healthcare," the account added. "This is what Republicans really think of the American people. They ram through policies making our lives worse in countless ways, then they laugh at us and spit in our faces. There has never been a more gleefully spiteful political movement."
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'Hospital Crisis Watch' Tracks Healthcare Center Closures Under Trump-GOP Budget Law
"Donald Trump and Republicans just sacrificed hospitals and lifesaving care for millions so they could hand out massive tax breaks to billionaires."
Jul 11, 2025
A healthcare advocacy group launched a project Thursday aimed at tracking hospital closures under the recently enacted Trump-GOP budget law, whose unprecedented cuts to Medicaid could force clinics across the United States to cut services or shut down entirely in the near future.
More than 700 rural hospitals, which rely heavily on Medicaid reimbursements, were already in dire financial straits prior to passage of the Republican budget package, which includes more than $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts. The new law is expected to push many struggling facilities over the edge.
"The consequences of this Republican bill are playing out in real time," said Protect Our Care, the advocacy organization behind new project, titled Hospital Crisis Watch. Earlier this month, a clinic in a rural Nebraska community announced that it would soon shut its doors, citing "anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid" as a major factor.
One analysis by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill estimates that more than 330 hospitals in rural areas across the U.S. are at risk of closing or curbing their services due to the Republican assault on Medicaid.
"With Hospital Crisis Watch, we're exposing the full scale of harm Republicans are inflicting on America's healthcare system."
Protect Our Care noted that Medicaid "accounts for one-fifth of spending on hospitals, one-fifth of hospital discharges, and at least one in five inpatient days in nearly every state."
" Donald Trump and Republicans just sacrificed hospitals and lifesaving care for millions so they could hand out massive tax breaks to billionaires," said Brad Woodhouse, the president of Protect Our Care. "This GOP bill won't just hurt people who rely on Medicaid or the Affordable Care Act—it rips care from everyone who depends on the hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes that will shut their doors as a result."
"With Hospital Crisis Watch, we're exposing the full scale of harm Republicans are inflicting on America's healthcare system—community by community, hospital by hospital," Woodhouse added. "The public deserves to know who's responsible, and we won't stop until Trump and Republicans are held accountable."
The project comes as hospital officials and healthcare experts are increasingly sounding the alarm about the looming impact of the Trump-GOP Medicaid cuts.
"What this does is put us at risk when the respiratory season hits," Benjamin Anderson, CEO of Hutchinson Regional Healthcare System, told NBC News earlier this week, saying the Medicaid cuts ensure that the 180-bed hospital his organization oversees will have to continue its hiring freeze.
"We're at real risk of wearing out the staff we have right now," Anderson warned.
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Trump's GOP Megabill Slams Door on Progress of the 20th Century
It’s not enough that Trump slashes taxes on the rich. He partially pays for those cuts in ways that punish poor and working-class people. Now we must fight like hell to regain what we've lost—and go further.
Jul 11, 2025
As Republican Senators moved their megabill through the Senate, I was celebrating the life of my father-in-law who died at 91 earlier this spring. Born during the Great Depression, he lived a long, prosperous, healthy life because of work and luck, but also because of doors opened by policies enacted between 1900 and 1980. This country’s biggest historical challenge has been delivering this progress to all Americans, but Republicans have cut it back for everyone, retreating from many 20th century achievements in ways that will slam doors, rather than opening them, for the next generation.
Lawmakers established the individual income tax in 1913, the corporate income tax in 1909, and the estate tax in 1916. The new tax law weakens all three. These taxes, combined with the payroll tax created in the 1935 New Deal, enabled poverty to plunge, education levels to soar, and lifespans to nearly double over the course of the 20th century. The roads and railroads, schools and colleges, and pipes and power sources that our tax dollars funded catalyzed industrial, educational, and health advancements that transformed our world.
The income tax, corporate tax, and estate tax raise revenue for our collective needs and do so progressively, falling most heavily on those most able to pay. These are the funding sources Republicans chose to attack in their megabill. That’s why the law’s huge giveaways go so resoundingly to the uber-rich. All told, the richest 1 percent – a group with incomes exceeding $916,900 per year – will get a trillion dollars in tax cuts over the next decade. Find the average annual gift to the wealthiest 1 percent in your state here.
More than 70 percent of this law’s tax cuts go to the richest fifth of people, while middle-income Americans get just 10 percent and the poorest fifth get less than 1 percent. And for 80 percent of Americans, Trump’s tariffs will offset most or all of the tax cuts by raising prices on things we all buy.
Make no mistake, President Trump and his Congress have guaranteed that fewer Americans will have health insurance, more children will go hungry, and states will have less federal funding to deliver good schools, affordable college, and quality roads and bridges.
It’s not enough that Trump slashes taxes on the rich. He partially pays for those cuts in ways that punish poor and working-class people. The new law makes the biggest reductions to health care in American history – stripping insurance coverage from 17 million Americans by kicking them off of Medicaid and taking away their Affordable Care Act subsidies. On top of booting people off health care, this will force near immediate closure of more than 300 rural hospitals.
The second major funding source literally takes food from hungry families by slashing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) (once known as food stamps), a program that provided a meager but essential $2.84 per person per meal last year. These are the biggest attacks on food aid in history, abandoning a core federal commitment to provide at least minimal nutrition to the elderly, disabled people, and the very poorest children.
The final major spending cuts end incentives that were sparking jobs and investments in the green energy economy. This threatens 4,500 clean energy projects, imperils hundreds of thousands of jobs, and is projected to add billions of dollars to Americans’ annual energy costs. The subsidies were reducing the carbon emissions that contribute to climate change. Gutting them is a baffling choice as hurricane season bears down on coastal regions. They also were strengthening domestic energy production, making the U.S. less dependent on oil suppliers in the middle east and elsewhere.
Despite spending cuts, the bill will add trillions over the next decade to the national debt. This will shift costs onto the next generation, making it more expensive to borrow to buy a home, finance college, or even purchase the basics.
My father-in-law lived a great life in part because of taxes. His generation – particularly white men in his generation – benefitted from growing investments in public schools, affordable college, a GI bill that made housing and higher education even more manageable, a skyrocketing economy, and plentiful jobs often with unions, wage growth, and sometimes, as in his case, great health insurance and a full pension.
None of the benefits of the boomer generation were distributed equally and Black Americans were particularly left out. And starting with Ronald Reagan’s assault on unions, job quality deteriorated, with health coverage and pensions eroding particularly for workers without a college degree. But make no mistake, President Trump and his Congress have guaranteed that fewer Americans will have health insurance, more children will go hungry, and states will have less federal funding to deliver good schools, affordable college, and quality roads and bridges.
A hard-working, devoted, optimistic man, my father-in-law had unyielding confidence that America would keep its promise to the next generation. This week Republicans reneged on that promise. We can collectively reclaim it, so every baby born today has the chance at upward mobility and achievement that many in previous generations did. America’s future just got dimmer. We have an obligation to restore its brightness.
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