‘Children Will Die:’ Democrats Raise Alarm About GOP Efforts to Cut Medicaid

New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham issued a stark warning that if Republicans in Congress and the Trump White House cut Medicaid, “People will die. Children will die.” She is joined by other Democrats who are raising the alarm about the planned cuts.

Grisham was speaking from experience. When her state cut spending on behavioral health years ago, she said, “more than a decade later, we are still digging out.”

“Providers left [the state]. Contractors left. People don’t have access. People died,” she said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation. “More drug abuse. More drug addiction. More behavioral health high-risk issues. It is a disaster.”

Republicans are planning to severely cut back spending on Medicaid, a health insurance program that provides access to care for low-income individuals and disabled people. The funding reductions will be used to offset the cost of extending Donald Trump‘s 2017 tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans as well as to help fund new tax cuts Trump promised during the presidential campaign. Trump himself has gone back and forth on whether he wants to lower or raise taxes on the rich.

“Indiscriminately just tearing apart Medicaid means that you are going after hard-working Americans in favor of billionaires and corporations who don’t need and aren’t asking for this $1.5 trillion tax cut,” Lujan Grisham said.

As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in an exclusive Rolling Stone interview published Saturday, “They’re robbing people in order to hand it over to the rich. Medicaid is one of the largest insurers in the United States of America.”

Ocasio-Cortez pointed to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office that included scoring on some of the GOP’s Medicaid plans. “They confirmed millions of Americans will be left out in the cold from their cuts on Medicaid,” she said.

On Saturday, Sen. Bernie Sanders said the plans to cut Medicaid are “what oligarchy is about.”
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“While planning massive cuts to Medicaid, the Republicans are proposing to provide another $235 billion in tax breaks to the top 0.2% of households through an increase in the estate tax exemption,” Sanders said on social media. “The very rich get richer. The poor lose health care. Outrageous.”

While Trump insisted he is “not cutting Medicaid” in an interview last weekend, Republicans in the House have already pledged to cut $880 billion in spending on programs it oversees funding for. To accomplish that would require significant reductions in Medicaid spending. The plans are part of legislation Trump has dubbed his “big, beautiful bill.”