Josh Hawley over the weekend did what anyone who knows anything about his brand of faux-populist politics should have known he was ultimately going to do: Missouri’s senior senator — who has spent months preening as that rare Republican who will steadfastly protect federal health care services for the poor — announced that he will vote to eviscerate federal health care services for the poor.
He didn’t put it that way, of course. But by agreeing to back President Donald Trump’s grotesquely misnamed “Big Beautiful Bill,†Hawley is essentially voting to gut Medicaid, the main federal health insurance program for low-income Americans, along with the Children's Health Insurance Program, by a total of more than $1 trillion over 10 years.
This is all in service to tax cuts for the wealthy. Those tax cuts will only partly be paid for by socking it to the poor. The rest of the cost will sock it to future generations by adding more than $3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
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Is this what Hawley meant when, in a much-lauded less than eight weeks ago, he sanctimoniously called on his party to “start delivering on America’s promise for America’s working people†by protecting Medicaid and other safety-net programs?
Never mind, Hawley might as well have said over the weekend as he voted to advance this cruel, expensive mess. At this writing (early Monday) a final Senate vote was still pending, but Hawley over the weekend said he is now
Don’t be fooled by the fig leaves Hawley’s colleagues in the Senate have given him to justify this astonishing betrayal of his own constituents. In announcing his support for the bill, he notes that Senate changes to the version that the House passed will temporarily shield Missouri from the worst of the cuts by increasing funding to a rural hospital fund and delaying implementation of other parts of the bill.
“With the delay in the provider tax framework that we were able to get and with the changes to the rural hospital fund, Missouri’s Medicaid dollars will actually increase over the next four years. So we will get more money — Medicaid funding — over baseline until 2030,†Hawley said Saturday, as reported by . “Any changes to our provider framework in Missouri will not take place until the next decade.â€
So instead of immediately hurting Missourians, the Medicaid cuts Hawley will vote for will instead hurt them in a few years. Does everyone feel better now?
That’s not our interpretation, by the way. It’s Hawley’s.
“I’m going to spend the next however long trying to make sure that the cuts that we have successfully delayed never take place,†he said Saturday. “I think that this effort to cut Medicaid funding is a mistake. We’ve been able for Missouri to delay it.â€
In other words: I’ve helped light a fuse that is ultimately going to devastate my most vulnerable constituents, in direct violation of my own promise not to. But don’t worry, because now I promise I’ll put that fuse out, over ³Ù³ó±ðÌýnext ... however long.
Still feel better?
There are some other fig leaves of which Hawley has availed himself. In what appears to be a direct sweetener for his vote, Senate leaders have tacked onto the bill a provision to finally provide funding to address the lingering health effects of radiation from World War II-era nuclear bomb development in the 51ºÚÁÏ area. That funding is needed, and Hawley has been right to seek it, but why should it come on the backs of the poorest Missourians?
And Hawley, with the rest of his party, continues to promote the cynical lie that much or all of the Medicaid cuts will target waste and fraud instead of booting legitimately needy Americans from their health care. Particularly putrid is the lie that it’s “reform†to impose a Medicaid work-verification requirement.
Such requirements have been shown to be unnecessary (most able-bodied Medicaid recipients are already working) and will have the primary result of causing even working people to lose their coverage by making an already-daunting bureaucracy even more so. Which might well be the whole point.
It must be noted that Hawley is hardly alone among Missouri politicians in his support of this plutocratic monstrosity. Missouri’s junior senator, Eric Schmitt, also voted to advance the bill over the weekend and is expected to vote for its passage. And every single one of Missouri’s Republican House members — Reps. Ann Wagner, Mark Alford, Eric Burlison, Sam Graves, Bob Onder and Jason Smith — has already voted to endanger the health care of their poorest constituents in order to coddle their richest. They will all almost certainly do so again when the Senate sends the bill back to the House.
The difference is that Hawley continues to position himself as a champion of the working poor — the very people who will ultimately be hurt by his vote. Cruel policy is one thing, but adding to it what Lincoln called “the base alloy of hypocrisy†merits special condemnation.
