Sen. Mitch McConnell, heading for the last round-up in his seemingly endless upper chamber tenure, is showing his true colors. This time it’s his dismissive attitude toward many of the voters who kept him in office over the past 40 years.
The Louisville Republican delivered a scintillating short address this week during a closed-door meeting of Senate Republicans, convened to mull the stupidly titled One Big Beautiful Bill, which currently includes a series of tax cuts that the Congressional Budget Office maintains will add $3.3 trillion to the nation’s $29 trillion debt over the next 10 years. This piece of infamous hackery simultaneously seeks to cut the Medicaid program by about $800 billion to hide at least a portion of the newly generated red ink in hopes of rendering this flea-bitted dog less egregious.
Fat chance.
Despite pressure from President-cum-Dictator Donald J. Trump and the GOP hierarchy, some Republican lawmakers, like Sen. Tom Tillis, of North Carolina, are becoming understandably queasy over this huge, bloody mess, concerned that ripping the popular Medicaid program asunder, thus stealing health care from low-income folks to fund a tax cut that disproportionally benefits the well-heeled, might not receive a rapturous greeting from the electorate in upcoming elections.
Given all that, it does not appear at this moment that the huge, ugly measure has enough votes to carry it over the hump.
To this, McConnell, who doesn’t have to face the voters again, offers a tut-tut.
According to Punchbowl News, McConnell, the erstwhile Senate Republican leader, told his colleagues that failing to pass the bill “is not an option.’’ He rambled on, explaining that, “I know a lot of us are hearing from people back home about Medicaid. But they’ll get over it.”
In other words, continue to pile up debt, put more dollars in the pockets of the wealthy and rely on the short attention span of the voting public to achieve the desired result of further burdening the poor.
That’s the McConnell way.
Mitch’s assessment might seem a little, well, cavalier, when you consider the Senate is contemplating making the already atrocious House-passed bill even worse, literally resulting in dumping the health care coverage for millions of Americans.
McConnell is not alone among Republican lawmakers in this regard. Confronted during a town hall meeting in Butler. Iowa, last month, Sen. Jodi Ernst defended the measure against the growing public apprehension that lives are threatened by explaining, “Well, we all are going to die.’’
True. But if the One Big Beautiful Bill proceeds apace a whole lot of folks might be meeting their maker sooner than necessary.
Ernst made her self-inflicted bad situation even worse by producing a sarcastic video ridiculing those who fear a slew of premature deaths. McConnell has sought to offer his own brand of backtracking, with his office telling the Courier Journal of Louisville that the “they’’ he referenced in his comment are “the people who are abusing Medicaid — the able-bodied Americans who should be working.”
Yeah, right. Nice try. The polls show a whole lot of people, including folks who aren’t on Medicaid and likely voted for McConnell in the past, think this bill stinks.
You might think that the massive downsizing of a program like Medicaid, despite McConnell’s calculation, would prove hard to forget, especially in a poor state like Kentucky where a little more than 28 percent of the population is enrolled in the program, second in the nation behind only Louisiana. Rep. Morgan McGarvey, D-Louisville, speaking at a House Budget Committee hearing this week, called the proposals “indefensible’’ and “reprehensible.’’
“And I don’t think the people in my state are just going to ‘get over it,'” he said.
Kentucky, despite McConnell’s devil-may-care attitude, will be among the states hardest hit by Medicaid cuts. According to the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, an estimated 277,000 people will be removed from the rolls if the bill becomes law.
But it doesn’t end there. The Center further projects that almost half of the commonwealth’s rural hospitals — 35 out of 72 – are liable to close as a result of the One Big Beautiful Bill, based on their listing among the top 10 percent of rural hospitals receiving benefits from Medicaid and their negative operating margins over the past several years.
“Republicans want to talk about waste, fraud, and abuse — they claim that’s all their budget cuts,’’ said McGarvey, who represents the state’s largest city, where 200,000 are enrolled in Medicaid, including 103,000 children under age 19. “Are rural hospitals a waste? Is getting care at a hospital close to home somehow committing fraud? Because their budget would close 35 of Kentucky’s rural hospitals.’’
The bill, McGarvey warned, “is taking health care away from people who use Medicaid. People like the 30 million children, the egiht million disabled Americans, the seven million seniors – even 10 percent of our veterans participate in the Medicaid program.’’
With the federal government potentially bailing out to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, more fiscal responsibility for key programs will fall in the laps of the states. And many, including Kentucky, don’t have the financial wherewithal to cope with the additional economic burden.
“But these additional expenses would come at the same time the risk of a recession is rising due in large part to tariff disruptions,’’ the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy reported. “And Kentucky’s tax receipts are already weakening because of individual income tax cuts that the General Assembly is phasing in. The state will create a new two-year budget in early 2026, but will face serious challenges addressing hunger and funding education, health care and other public needs if the federal package of policies becomes law.’’
Added McGarvey, “Republicans refuse to craft a sensible budget, but state legislators still have to, so if these cuts go through, a state like mine is going to be devastated. It’ll blow a massive hole in Kentucky’s budget.”
“I value the people who are counting on the hospitals in their rural counties to get health care,” McGarvey said. “Not the richest Americans who are going to get a tax cut under this bill that’s going to drive our debt up and take health care away from people.”
But Mitch dismisses those concerns with the wave of a hand, secure in the faith that they’ll simply overlook the whole rigmarole when time comes for them to cast a ballot. His dismissive attitude shows a contempt for the folks he represents, showing little, if any, concern for his constituents in need while faithfully believing they’ll give up the ghost at a convenient moment.
An analysis published last week in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that the bill, should it become law, will lead to thousands of preventable deaths.
The study, according to NBC News, “estimated the cuts could cause nearly 2 million people to lose their primary doctor, 1.3 million people to not fill medications they need and 380,270 women to skip a mammogram. More than 16,600 people could die as a result of losing access to or forgoing care, the researchers estimated.’’
Of course this is no longer a concern for Mitch. Even if he was running for an eighth term the voters, in his view, would forget. And some of them would have died anyway.