Posted on Monday, June 16, 2025
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by David Catron
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20 Comments
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If you are among the shrinking number of Americans who rely on the major broadcast networks for news, it would be easy to conclude that the GOP budget reconciliation package – the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” – is nothing but a scheme by President Trump and congressional Republicans to rob you in order to further enrich their billionaire friends. The legacy media have provided an enormous amount of airtime to Democrats who insist that plundering the American people is the primary purpose of the legislation.
It’s easy to see why the liberal messaging machine is frantically trying to sell this narrative. The Big Beautiful Bill constitutes the foundation of President Trump’s agenda, and the Democrats are desperate to kill it.
Killing this legislation will be no easy task, however, despite some consternation among the Republican ranks. The GOP holds a majority in the Senate – albeit a narrow one. Assuming every Democrat votes against it, and even if they peel off a Republican or two, the math still doesn’t work. They don’t have the votes.
Moreover, because the Republicans plan to pass the bill using the reconciliation process, the Democrats can’t deploy the filibuster. Consequently, the Democrats have reverted to demagoguery and fear mongering based on fictitious claims about the bill’s contents.
Last Friday, for example, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) stood in the well of the Senate to denounce Trump and the bill in the following florid terms:
Donald Trump’s days of pretending to be a populist are over—his budget is an all-out assault on health care, education, public safety, programs that help small business. They want to axe domestic programs that help hundreds of millions of people by nearly a quarter. It’s radical to its rotten core. The budget is proof positive that the emperor has no clothes: Donald Trump is a con man who does not care one iota about the struggles of everyday Americans. He’d rather listen to his billionaire buddies than to the American people in terms of what the country needs.
This ridiculous rant contains so much balderdash that it is difficult to know where to start debunking
Let’s focus on the “all-out assault on health care.” In reality, the GOP budget bill will continue current funding for all federal health care benefits – including Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare – but only for those who are eligible to receive them. This is what the Democrats are really unhappy about. Consequently, they are waving around a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate that the Big Beautiful Bill will eliminate health care insurance for 16 million people. However, as the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board writes:
The reason Democrats shout about CBO’s estimates is that they want Americans on government healthcare. Medicaid is one of their vehicles to put all Americans under Bernie Sanders-style single payer. Most Republicans want Medicaid to focus on the truly needy rather than able-bodied young adults. This is what’s really at stake in the Medicaid debate. The GOP’s mistake is settling for modest changes rather than the big structural reforms that would improve Medicaid coverage and make it affordable for the long run. Republicans will get hammered no matter what they do.
In other words, the health “insurance” the GOP budget bill would cut is primarily Medicaid coverage. The bill would make two main changes to Medicaid: add a 20-hour per week work requirement and remove all non-citizens from the program.
The Democrats asked the CBO to estimate the change in the number of uninsured people pursuant to policy changes associated with the Big Beautiful Bill. Its response reads as follows: “CBO estimates that the combined effects of those policies – two under current law and the others under H.R. 1 – would increase the number of people without health insurance by 16.0 million in 2034.”
The current number of uninsured Americans, according to the most recent CDC estimates, is 26.2 million. The Democrats and the “non-partisan” CBO expect us to believe the Big Beautiful Bill will drive that figure up to pre-Obamacare levels. This seems suspiciously convenient for the Democrat Party.
The CBO estimate also fails to account for a distinct possibility: faced with the prospect of losing taxpayer-funded insurance, able-bodied, working-age adults may finally be motivated to find gainful employment and earn health insurance for themselves. And illegal aliens, seeing the writing on the wall, may choose to take President Trump’s invitation and return to their home countries once the gravy train dries up.
Moreover, it is somewhat misleading to call Medicaid “insurance” in the first place. According to the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Health Economics, Medicaid’s “average pay is the lowest of any insurer, including Medicare.” Most primary care physicians can’t afford to accept new Medicaid patients. Many of these folks must get their primary care in the ER. That’s why the wait is so long when you are dealing with a genuine emergency.
This is one of the reasons new polling data indicates that the Medicaid work requirements in the Big Beautiful Bill enjoy strong public support, as does the provision ending Medicaid for illegal aliens.
As to Senator Schumer’s hysterical claims about education and public safety, Trump and Republicans control the high ground on both of those issues as well.
In the final analysis, no amount of Democrat balderdash is going kill the Big Beautiful Bill. A new Quinnipiac poll shows the approval rating of the Democratic Party among registered voters has fallen to a catastrophic 21 percent. Voters don’t take them seriously. Nor should they.
David Catron is a Senior Editor at the American Spectator. His writing has also appeared in PJ Media, the American Thinker, the Providence Journal, the Catholic Exchange and a variety of other publications.
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