Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is accusing fellow Republicans of turning their backs on the poor and middle-class by planning to dramatically slash the federal-state program that provides health insurance about 71 million adult Americans and 7 million children enrolled in CHIP.
In an op-ed published at the liberal New York Times, Hawley said the “Wall Street wing” of the Republican Party is focusing on financial issues on Capitol Hill, which benefit the wealthy, but they’re ignoring the poor and working class.
“This wing of the party,” he wrote, “wants Republicans to build our big, beautiful bill around slashing health insurance for the working poor.”
In his own home state, Hawley said approximately 1 million Missourians depend on Medicaid or CHIP, which is about 21 percent of the state’s population.
In a scathing rebuttal to Hawley’s claims, an op-ed at The Wall Street Journal accused Hawley of trying to imitate President Trump’s populism by posing as an advocate for the poor and the working class.
"Trump voters are more discerning than Mr. Hawley gives them credit for," columnist Allysia Finley writes.
What Hawley called a “hidden tax” in the GOP bill, Finley says, is a $35 copayment for able-bodied adults who are enrolled in Medicaid. The article similarly criticizes Hawley’s op-ed for using the story of a married mother of five children to claim the GOP bill could kill her daughter, who depends on a feeding tube and has costly medical bills.
“No, it couldn’t,” Finley counters, because the bill’s reforms don’t affect disabled people nor children.
Accusing Republicans of hating the poor and catering to the rich is a standard talking point of Democrats, and both Hawley and Democrats are currently predicting – correctly – that millions will be booted from Medicaid if President Trump signs the GOP bill.
Left out of that talking point and Hawley’s op-ed, however, is who Republicans say they plan to drop from Medicaid: 1.4 million illegal aliens and 1.2 million ineligible recipients.
The biggest planned reform from Republicans is to require abled-bodied, non-working adults, estimated to be 4.8 million Medicaid recipients, to find part-time employment or get booted from the program.
In 2024, the Medicaid program cost $914 billion. State governments spent about 36%, or $326 billion, to cover not only the poor and disabled but also - according to Hawley's GOP colleagues - illegal immigrants, fraudsters, and non-working, able-bodied recipients.
In the New York Times op-ed, there is no mention of those work requirements or any acknowledgement of the other reforms, even though Hawley has told The Washington Examiner he supports work requirements for abled-bodied Medicaid recipients.
Jameson Taylor, director of policy and legislative affairs at the American Family Association, tells AFN Hawley is angering conservatives by fighting the GOP plan to cut federal spending by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse in the Medicaid program.
Enrollment in Medicaid “skyrocketed” because of Obamacare, which opened up the health insurance program to abled-bodied adults with no children, so Republicans in Congress are now attempting to reform that allowance, Taylor explained.
“The data shows that 60% of able-bodied adults on Medicaid are not working at all,” Taylor says.
Asked why Hawley, a reliably conservative lawmaker, is opposing the Medicaid reforms, Taylor speculates that there is unseen politics going on out of the public eye.
"His argument is very weak, which suggests to me something else is going on behind the scenes," Taylor shares. "Perhaps Senate leadership wants him to weigh in against the bill."
Editor's Note: American Family Association is the parent organization of the American Family News Network, which operates AFN.net.
