Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is warning against his own party’s push to slash Medicaid spending, just hours after House Republicans released legislation that could save billions of dollars and make millions of people lose health insurance coverage.
Hawley wrote in an op-ed published Monday in The New York Times that paying for President Trump’s domestic agenda by slashing health care for the working poor “is both morally wrong and politically suicidal.”
“Mr. Trump has promised working-class tax cuts and protection for working-class social insurance, such as Medicaid,” Hawley wrote. “But now a noisy contingent of corporatist Republicans — call it the party’s Wall Street wing — is urging Congress to ignore all that and get back to the old-time religion: corporate giveaways, preferences for capital and deep cuts to social insurance.”
Hawley has consistently spoken up about his opposition to the House plan to use Medicaid cuts to pay for the party-line megabill. The House Energy and Commerce Committee has been charged with finding at least $880 billion in federal spending cuts over the next decade.
Missouri is one of several red states that expanded Medicaid. Despite his longtime opposition to ObamaCare, Hawley has made it clear he will protect access to Medicaid in his state and will not support legislation that would lead to benefit cuts for Missourians.
“Republicans need to open their eyes: Our voters support social insurance programs. More than that, our voters depend on those programs,” Hawley wrote.
Hawley’s opposition is a clear sign of the rocky road ahead for the House bill in the Senate. Republicans have only a slim majority in the upper chamber, and several GOP senators have shown little interest in trying to navigate the political minefield of Medicaid changes.
House Republicans have been weighing imposing per-capita caps on expansion states like Missouri. But the legislation unveiled late Sunday did not include that policy, nor another controversial change that would have directly cut federal payments to Medicaid expansion states.
Instead, the provisions included in the bill would likely force states to make their own difficult decisions about funding Medicaid by cutting benefits or raising taxes.
According to a preliminary Congressional Budget Office analysis released by Democrats, more than 8.5 million people would lose health insurance if the Medicaid and other health provisions of the GOP legislation take effect.
Without addressing details of the bill, Hawley noted “many of my House and Senate colleagues keep pushing for substantial cuts, and the House will begin to hash out its differences in negotiations this week.”
Both Energy and Commerce and the House Ways and Means Committee are planning marathon sessions Tuesday that will likely stretch into Wednesday to advance their respective parts of the bill.
“If Republicans want to be a working-class party — if we want to be a majority party — we must ignore calls to cut Medicaid and start delivering on America’s promise for America’s working people,” Hawley wrote.
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