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Blue states slash Medicaid coverage for illegal aliens
Since around 2020, Washington, D.C., and seven states have opened their health care programs to illegal aliens. However, since President Trump's administration began, some states have abruptly changed their policy positions.
According to the Associated Press, California, Illinois, and Minnesota, all heavily Democrat-run states, have announced that they will be scaling back or ending their Medicaid programs for illegal aliens.
'When we looked at the state budget, the dollars were not there to support what was passed and what was being spent.'
Illinois will begin slashing its Medicaid availability immediately for illegal immigrants ages 42-64 for an estimated $404 million in savings.
Minnesota likewise will be ending the program for adult illegal immigrants immediately. It is estimated that the state will save $57 million with this policy change.
RELATED: Pushing back against the big Medicaid lie
Minnesota Speaker Lisa Demuth (R) said that the health care program was not sustainable in her state.
“It wasn’t about trying to be non-compassionate or not caring about people,” she said, according to the AP. “When we looked at the state budget, the dollars were not there to support what was passed and what was being spent.”
Illegal alien adults in Minnesota will still have the option of purchasing health insurance, Demuth said.
California, on the other hand, will stop enrolling adult illegal immigrants into its program in 2026, which will save the state more than $3 billion over several years.
Health officials estimate that roughly 200,000 illegal aliens will lose health coverage in California when the program cuts take effect next year. However, Governor Gavin Newsom (D) reportedly maintains that the state still provides the most expansive health care coverage for poor adults.
Health care providers have pointed to the increasing number of immigration raids by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency as a contributing factor of changing patient behavior. Fears of deportation have decreased the number of regular health care visits from illegal aliens.
This change in policy in blue states comes in light of the broader deportation efforts by the Trump administration, which has reversed many of the immigration policies of the Biden administration.
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Pushing back against the big Medicaid lie
Democrats were virtually salivating as they unanimously voted against Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act ahead of the Independence Day holiday, which certainly should give pause to Republicans as they prepare for the midterms and the 2028 elections beyond.
What gives the Democrats hope that they can campaign effectively against Trump’s mega-bill? Is it the fact that Republicans were able to make permanent the 2017 tax cuts? Are they planning to campaign against the “no tax on tips” provision that even Kamala Harris supported? Will they claim that funding border security and mass deportation of illegal aliens is somehow bad for the country?
Remember, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is the codification of the agenda that President Trump ran on in 2024. It’s not tricky. It’s not nefarious.
No, no, and no. Democrats are not idiots. They know that they have the short straw on all of those 80-20 issues. So they are going back to the same issue they have demagogued since 2008 — health care. By tugging on the heartstrings of the American public, they know they can use fear to win votes.
Demagoguing Medicaid ... again
During debate in both the House and Senate, Democrats relied on questionable forward-looking interpretations of the impact of the mega-bill on Medicaid to claim that nearly 12 million low-income people would lose health coverage if the bill passed, as it ultimately did.
The left-leaning Congressional Budget Office supplied some of that data, and by the time the vote was finalized on July 3, various other groups were adding fuel to the fire. KFF, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation, added the 12 million people who would allegedly lose Medicaid to the five million who KFF claimed would lose coverage in the Affordable Care Act marketplace, concluding that at least 17 million would be at risk. Then, there was the claim that Trump’s budget would deny food stamps to hungry children and pregnant women.
But not so fast. Despite the bleak picture painted by Democrats and weak-kneed RINOs that Trump wanted poor people to just die and be done with it, there were reasonable explanations for all the budget changes that had nothing to do with genocide.
Reductions in Obamacare premium subsidies are just an acknowledgment that the COVID crisis is over, and those boosted premiums are no longer necessary. Likewise, food stamps are still going to be provided to the disabled, families with young children, and the impoverished elderly, even if Democrats want to pretend otherwise.
And pretend they will, so if Republicans want to prevail in future elections, they had better fully understand the truth about the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, because otherwise, they will be painted as heartless elitists who want their fellow Americans to die by the millions.
Telling the truth
Fortunately, the road map is already clear on how to respond to the demagoguery of the Democrats, and it was modeled by two members of the Trump administration on the Sunday morning talk shows over the long holiday weekend.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, faced down their hostile questioners on CNN’s “State of the Union” and CBS’ “Face the Nation” respectively.
Bessent, who by all accounts is the most competent member of Trump’s Cabinet, immediately pushed back on Dana Bash’s supposition that the bill would cut benefit programs like Medicaid:
Only in D.C. is a 20% hike over 10 years a cut. Medicaid funding will go up 20% over the next 10 years. The people who Medicaid was designed for — the pregnant women, the disabled, and families with children under 14 — will be refocused. The able-bodied Americans are not vulnerable Americans, so a work requirement or a community service requirement, that’s very popular with the public.
Bessent then struck a blow against the argument that millions of Americans will lose their Medicaid coverage because they didn’t remember to reapply for benefits under the new rules.
“It is a group of Democrats who unfortunately seem to think that poor people are stupid,” he said. “I don’t think poor people are stupid. I think they have agency, and I think to have them register twice a year for these benefits is not a burden. But these people who want to infantilize the poor and those who need these Medicaid benefits are alarmist.”
RELATED: The budget hoax that nearly sank Trump’s biggest win (so far)
Over on “Face the Nation,” Hassett was interviewed by Weijia Jiang, senior White House correspondent for CBS. She dutifully recited the claim that 12 million people would lose their Medicaid coverage, but Hassett struck back hard:
Let’s unbundle that a little bit. What we are actually doing is asking for a work requirement, but the work requirement is that you need to be looking for work or even doing volunteer work, and you don’t need to do it until your kids are 14 or older, so the idea that that’s going to cause a massive hemorrhaging in availability of insurance doesn’t make a lot of sense. And if you look at the CBO numbers, if you look at the numbers they say are going to lose insurance, about five million of those are people who have other insurance. ... If they lose one, they’re still insured.
Hassett also explained that the best way to get insurance is to get a job, and so if the Trump economy stimulates growth, it will help people to happily leave Medicaid after they gain employment.
On another question, about whether the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is harmful because it grows the national debt by between $3 trillion and $5 trillion over the next 10 years, Hassett responded by reminding the reporter that the Congressional Budget Office is underestimating growth in the economy compared to what happened in the first Trump term pre-COVID. Based on that historical record, Hassett expects the debt to actually shrink by $1.5 trillion in the next decade.
What Hassett didn’t say, but which should be on the lips of every Republican defending their votes for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is that over the 10 years from 2014 to 2024, the federal debt increased by more than $17.5 trillion. Admittedly, Trump’s first term played a role in that thanks to COVID, but only Trump and Republicans are making any effort today to shrink the debt. If left up to Democrats, every social program in the budget would see increased funding, deficit be damned.
Fight fear with facts
To summarize, here are the talking points that every Republican candidate for Congress must master if they hope to beat back Democrat distortions:
- Republicans voted to increase Medicaid spending over the next 10 years by 20%.
- Republicans voted to preserve Medicaid for the needy by making sure that everyone using the program’s valuable resources is truly needy — and eligible.
- Republicans voted to create an economy where more people can get jobs that provide high-quality health insurance. Emphasize this: Jobs are good.
- Republicans treat Medicaid recipients with dignity, asking them to follow simple rules to qualify for the benefit, rather than treating them as helpless wards of the state.
- Republicans are bending the curve downward on the national debt. Even if the CBO is right that the debt will increase by $3.5 trillion over the next 10 years, that increase is only 20% of what it was over the previous 10 years. And the Trump tax cuts are expected to stimulate the economy, so the national debt should actually decrease.
Those will do for a start. Remember, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is the codification of the agenda that President Trump ran on in 2024. It’s not tricky. It’s not nefarious. And if it is unpopular, that’s only because Democrats have been lying about it.
Now, it’s up to Republicans to fight back against the big Medicaid lie, or else pay the price for their silence.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
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It is yet another example of egregious judicial overreach.The budget hoax that nearly sank Trump’s biggest win (so far)
Conservatives are celebrating a once-in-a-generation legislative triumph with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4 by President Trump. But the victory almost didn’t happen — thanks to what can only be described as the “budget hawk hoax,” a long-standing tactic used by phony conservatives to block meaningful reforms from becoming law.
The heart of this hoax is that the overriding problem facing America is “the deficit crisis” — and that nothing else on the conservative agenda can ever be moved forward until we deal with it.
Too many conservatives have fallen for the 'budget hawk hoax' for far too long.
But when the conversation turns to cutting wasteful spending, these same so-called budget hawks introduce a poison pill: the notion that the only serious way to reduce the deficit is by gutting Social Security and Medicare — before touching any other government waste.
They know this is a nonstarter — and we all know it’s a nonstarter — because there is no way voters will ever allow Nana’s Social Security to be cut while we’re still using taxpayer money to fund LGBTQ+ programs in Nepal and Botswana.
The impossible dream?
Even worse, the faux-conservative “budget hawks” have generally dismissed any efforts to cut other wasteful government spending, insisting that it would have been a mere insignificant drop in the bucket. Yet when President Trump tried to secure $5 billion in funding for the border wall in his first term, budget hawks protested that we couldn’t afford it.
When the Trump administration began dismantling corrupt NGOs under USAID, legacy “conservative” media scoffed at the effort because it didn’t yield massive dollar savings. Yet if we don’t eliminate such foundational waste first, long-term entitlement reform has no credible path forward.
The truth is, of course, that Conservatism Inc. was just desperately trying to protect the corrupt status quo, keep left-wing spending in place, and deny any spending that advances the conservative agenda.
The same old playbook was rolled out again with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Critics labeled it “budget-busting,” but that claim was misleading. The bill didn’t increase spending. In fact, it prevented a scheduled tax hike that would have rolled back Trump-era tax cuts and restored pre-2017 rates.
RELATED: The reality behind this week’s One Big Beautiful Bill spectacle
To be fair to the bill’s critics, the history of omnibus bills is fraught with corruption. Typically, omnibus bills have been legislative horse trades: Republicans secure pork for their districts, and Democrats secure massive expansions of the welfare state. But the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is different. It actually slashes major government spending in ways that align with long-standing conservative demands.
For instance, the $7,500 federal incentive for electric vehicle purchases is set to expire almost immediately. Under the old playbook, such a subsidy would have increased in exchange for some infrastructure funding in a red district. Not this time.
By trying to defeat the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, “budget hawks” were actually striving to protect and perpetuate the following left-wing agenda items, all in the name of “fiscal conservatism”:
- A massive tax increase, restoring Obama-level tax rates.
- Allowing able-bodied Medicaid recipients to continue taking welfare without being required to work.
- Maintaining all the federal EV rebates and green energy incentives, which are designed to deny Americans the right to affordable energy and reliable transportation.
- Blocking border security by denying funding for the border wall, additional detention centers, and additional Border Patrol staffing.
It’s even more obscene when you consider the enormous cost to taxpayers of providing social services for illegal aliens — services the “budget hawks” are trying to save — while also perpetuating open borders because “we can’t afford” measures to seal the border.
Too many conservatives have fallen for the “budget hawk hoax” for far too long, accepting that we cannot have any conservative victories so long as we have a national debt. Perhaps that day has finally ended.
Yes, our country’s fiscal crisis is real, and it will persist. But forsaking any victories over the left because of the deficit is not a matter of high principle. It’s simply surrender.
The “budget hawks” will never be able to fix the deficit. They don’t want to. But given the chance, they would continue to use the issue to prevent real conservatives from ever passing useful legislation.
The hoax failed
They lost this round — and thank heaven for that!
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act stops income tax hikes in their tracks. It strips funding from Planned Parenthood, rogue judges notwithstanding. It shuts down the EV grift. It tightens border security and reins in Medicaid fraud.
This is what winning looks like — and the self-styled “budget hawks” hate it. Why? Because it derails the left’s agenda and puts the public back in charge.
Credit goes to President Trump and Speaker Johnson for delivering this landmark victory. And to Stephen Miller — relentless as ever — for making sure the truth broke through.
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