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Medicaid cuts under consideration by Republicans “will cause the American people to nearly revolt,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said Wednesday.
Children and older adults will be hit the hardest, as well as those with private insurance, he predicted to Stephanie Ruhle, MSNBC host and a senior business analyst with NBC News, at Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington, DC — and “rural healthcare will cease to exist.”
Republicans are starting to craft a party-line tax-and-spending bill that could end up with significant cuts to Medicaid; the House GOP committee in charge of the health care program is eyeing $880 billion in cuts over 10 years. Yet there’s plenty of skepticism about those cuts from centrists in the party, and critics on the left have warned that such cuts would endanger lives: A new analysis Wednesday from the liberal think tank Center for American Progress predicted that more than 34,000 people could die each year if Republican lawmakers pass the cuts.
Cutting Medicaid will turn voters against Trump, including his own supporters, Beshear said.
“I tell you what will move people more than anything else, and that’s the potential Medicaid cuts that could come out of Congress,” the Democrat said.
“Medicaid covers the people we love the most in this world, our parents and our kids,” he said. “Fifty percent of all Kentucky kids are covered by Medicaid. Seventy percent of all of our long-term costs are covered by Medicaid. And rural health care will cease to exist if they do major cuts.”
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Beshear also took aim Wednesday at Trump’s tariffs, and the retaliatory measures some countries have put against his state’s $9 billion bourbon industry. The European Union has proposed a 50% tariff on all US whiskey, while Canada has set its own 25% duties on all US imports. Beshear was especially frustrated by Trump’s tariffs on Canada, which he characterized as a betrayal.
“Canada has been an amazing ally to the United States, and they love bourbon… and they have followed us into just about every international conflict we’ve been in,” he said. “They’re not just looking at reciprocal tariffs, they’re taking American products off the shelf, and it’s hard to blame them, based on the way that they’re being treated.”
Trump is hurting America economically, risking global security, and drawing enemies from all parties, Beshear said. “I’ve never seen anything in politics more attributable to one person and one person alone than his tariff decisions that are devastating our economy,” he said.
Beshear said that Republican Sen. Rand Paul and Sen. Mitch McConnell have echoed his criticism on tariffs, quipping that “[if] Rand Paul, Mitch McConnell and I all agree on something, it’s probably because it’s true.”
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