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

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But during his 2024 campaign, Trump once again called for the ACA to be repealed.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.

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"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."

"Here, it helps to remember what the Affordable Care Act sought to accomplish, and the key role Medicaid played in that," Cohn writes. "The law's main goal was to make decent health insurance available to all Americans, as part of a decades-long, still unfinished campaign to make health care a basic right, as it is in every other economically advanced nation. That meant getting coverage to the uninsured, including low-income Americans who didn't have a way to get insurance on their own because their jobs didn't offer coverage or made coverage available at premiums they couldn't afford, and because individual policies — the kind you buy on your own, not through a job — were either too expensive or unavailable to them because of pre-existing conditions."

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Jonathan Cohn's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.