After months of leading the charge against Medicaid cuts in the GOP’s reconciliation bill, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) now appears to have suddenly changed his tune.
Once the Senate’s most vocal opponent of any Medicaid reductions, Hawley now says he’d “be fine” with most of the proposed cuts, as long as one key provision gets fixed, according to a new report in NOTUS.
“They’ve got to fix this hospital piece of it,” Hawley told the publication Tuesday. “And if they do that, then I think that’d be fine.”
It’s a dramatic shift from just last month, when Hawley called on his party to “ignore calls to cut Medicaid and start delivering on America’s promise for America’s working people” in a New York Times op-ed titled, “Don’t Cut Medicaid.”
While the MAGA lawmaker now claims he’s “always supported” provisions like Medicaid work requirements and anti-fraud measures, he’s "mostly pivoted to limiting the impact of Medicaid cuts on rural hospitals,” NOTUS said Tuesday. “It’s significant movement, though he is still a distance from supporting the reconciliation bill at the moment.”
The Senate bill, as it now stands, would gradually slash the Medicaid provider tax rate, a crucial source of state Medicaid funding. Hawley had warned that the cuts would devastate rural hospitals. But the latest version would freeze the tax instead, and as NOTUS reported Tuesday, Hawley “seems like he could live” with that fix.
Still, in an interview earlier Tuesday with MAGA influencer Steve Bannon, Hawley repeated his call to remove Medicaid cuts and warned the bill would harm Trump voters.
"We've got 1.3 million people, Steve, who are on Medicaid, including hundreds of thousands of kids," Hawley told Bannon. "Most of these people are not folks who are deadbeats, staying at home, not working. These are working people who are on Medicaid because they don't have a job that gives them insurance on the job."
He added: "These are Trump people, these are our people. These are the people who voted for Donald Trump in the state of Missouri by 18 percentage points."
It remains unclear whether Hawley will back the final bill.