'Big downsizing': GOP plans to snatch health coverage from 'millions of low-income' people [View all]

Source: Raw Story

April 20, 2025 8:55PM ET


When Democrats recaptured the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms and enjoyed a net gain of 41 seats, President Donald Trump's unpopular efforts to overturn the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare, were cited as a major factor. Obamacare, many Democratic strategists argued, had become a toxic issue for Republicans.

But during his 2024 campaign, Trump once again called for the ACA to be repealed. In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on April 19, journalist Jonathan Cohn warns that millions of Americans could lose their health insurance if Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) succeed in undermining Obamacare and Medicaid.

"The likelihood of Donald Trump and his allies in Congress taking Medicaid away from millions of low-income Americans — and, in the process, rolling back a huge piece of the Affordable Care Act — has increased significantly in the last two weeks," Cohn explains. "The change has been easy to miss, because so many other stories are dominating the news — and because the main evidence is a subtle shift in Republican rhetoric. But that shift has been crystal clear if you follow the ins and outs of health care policy — and if you were listening closely to House Speaker Mike Johnson a week ago, when he appeared on Fox News."

On Fox News, Johnson said, "We have to root out fraud, waste, and abuse. We have to eliminate people on, for example, on Medicaid who are not actually eligible to be there — able-bodied workers, for example, young men who are — who should never be on the program at all." Johnson's remarks, Cohn notes, "may sound like a defense of Medicaid" but included "the language Medicaid critics have been using to describe a big, controversial downsizing of the program."

Read more: https://www.rawstory.com/big-downsizing-obamacare-mike-johnson/