Trump Agriculture Chief Mocked for Suggesting Medicaid Recipients Could Replace Deported Farm Workers

from Common Dreams

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Tuesday drew instant jeers when she defended the mass deportation of immigrant farm laborers and suggested that they could be replaced by Americans who are currently enrolled in Medicaid.

While speaking in Washington, D.C., Rollins declared that there would be "no amnesty" for immigrant farm workers despite President Donald Trump saying just days ago that he was willing to let these workers stay at their jobs.

Instead, Rollins said that the mass deportations of farm laborers would "continue in a strategic way" and administration policy would be to "move the workforce toward automation and 100% American participation, which, again, with 34 million people, able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do fairly quickly."

The idea that there are 34 million "able-bodied adults" on Medicaid who can be easily relocated to work picking crops is pure fantasy. In the first place, an estimated 64% of American adults who receive Medicaid already work, and most of those adult recipients who don't have jobs are either primary caregivers, are attending school, or have an illness or disability that prevents them from working.

A report released earlier this year authored by Economic Policy Institute economist Hilary Wething also poked holes in the narrative that millions of "able-bodied adults without dependents" ("ABAWDs") were sponging off the system...

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Don’t rely on Medicaid? Tax bill will drive up costs to your healthcare to

from al Jazeera

United States President Donald Trump’s signature piece of budget legislation, the “One Big Beautiful Bill”, will likely raise healthcare costs, experts have said. While the Medicaid cuts will directly impact those who depend on the programme, the consequences will extend to others as well.

The 869-page bill, which includes roughly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over the next decade, passed in the House along party lines, with only two Republicans – Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania – breaking ranks. It will be signed into law by Trump on Friday...

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'People Will Suffer, People Will Die': GOP Nears Final Passage of Largest Medicaid Cuts in US History

from Common Dreams

House Republicans are on the verge of passing legislation that is projected to strip health coverage and food aid from millions of people across the United States, all to pay for tax breaks that will flow disproportionately to a small sliver of rich Americans.

The final vote on the sprawling budget reconciliation package, which narrowly passed the Senate on Tuesday, is expected Thursday after hours of jockeying among Republican leaders and holdovers in the GOP's ranks overnight. Republicans finally cleared a procedural hurdle to begin debate on the measure after 3 am ET on Thursday...

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Trump Administration Live Updates: Policy Bill Moves Toward Final House Vote

from the NYT

The House took its first step early Thursday toward a final vote on President Trump’s marquee domestic policy bill, after Republicans put down a revolt by conservative holdouts that had threatened to sink it.

After a day and night of paralysis on the House floor, and haggling and uncertainty in the Capitol, Speaker Mike Johnson scored a preliminary victory in his bid to overcome resistance within his party when the House voted to allow the bill to come up for debate. The 219-to-213 vote suggested he had won the backing of recalcitrant Republicans whose resistance had stalled the measure, though the House still had to take a final vote to approve it.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, was delaying the vote on Thursday morning by using his prerogative as a leader to take far more than his allotted one minute to speak, assailing the bill as a “disgusting abomination” that would hurt Americans. Mr. Jeffries began speaking before 5 a.m. Eastern and has spent much of his time reading testimonials from Americans who said they relied on Medicaid and worried that cuts to the program would upend their lives...

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A Ponderous Chain: Trump's Rapacious, Craven Budget Backstab

Title says it all.

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Trumps Rapacious Violent Budget Bill is Class Warfare

Proposed changes to Medicaid, other health programs could lead to over 51,000 preventable deaths, researchers warn https://nomadiceveryman.blogspot.com/2025/06/proposed-changes-to-medicaid-other.html

 "A Rotten Racket" Senator Whitehouse Rebukes Republican Bill https://nomadiceveryman.blogspot.com/2025/06/a-rotten-racket-senator-whitehouse.html

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Rich Gain and Poor Lose in Republican Policy Bill, Budget Office Finds

from the NYT

The far-reaching domestic policy bill that Republicans recently pushed through the House would provide rich Americans with a financial lift while taking away government benefits from the poor, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Thursday.

The analysis is the first from the budget office that lays out how Americans at different income levels would be affected by the Republican legislation, which slashes taxes and cuts spending on safety-net programs like Medicaid and food stamps. Americans would, on average, gain from the bill, according to the analysis, but the consequences would be very different for poor Americans and for rich ones.

The bottom 10 percent, for example, would overall lose government benefits worth an average of $1,559, or 3.9 percent of their current income, each year over the next decade, according to the budget office. The bottom 30 percent of Americans would all, on average, lose more benefits than they would receive from the bill. In contrast, the top 10 percent would gain an average of $12,044, a 2.3 percent annual increase to their current income.

Middle-class Americans would see smaller gains. The middle 10 percent of Americans would on average net $514 per year if the measure were enacted, an annual increase of 0.5 percent in their current income.

Overall, the richer Americans are, the larger the benefit they would receive from the legislation. That is true for the bill overall over the next decade, as well as for each individual year through 2034 as provisions in the bill phase in and out...

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Policy Expert Details Cruelty and Pointlessness of GOP's Medicaid Work Requirements

from Common Dreams

Days after Trump Cabinet officials championed work requirements in the pages of The New York Times, a progressive policy expert wrote in that same newspaper on Friday that such mandates—particularly for Medicaid recipients—are "cruel and pointless," potentially stripping critical benefits from millions of people through no fault of their own.

The GOP proposal, which advanced out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee earlier this week, would require many Medicaid recipients to prove that they worked or did some related activity for at least 80 hours per month. Republicans are also seeking to dramatically expand work requirements for recipients of federal nutrition assistance.

Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project, a left-wing think tank, argued in his Times op-ed that "imposing work requirements on Medicaid is a fundamentally misguided policy," particularly given that "it is employers, not workers, who make hiring, firing, and scheduling decisions."

"Last year, over 20 million workers were laid off or fired at some point from their jobs," Bruenig observed. "Many of those workers ended up losing not just all of their income but also their employer-sponsored health care. Medicaid is supposed to provide a backstop for these workers, but if we tie eligibility to work, they will find themselves locked out of the healthcare system because of decisions their employers made, often for reasons beyond their control."...

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