Mike Johnson Says It’s “Moral” To Kick People Off Medicaid

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson argued this past weekend that it was “moral” to kick people off a Medicaid with their recently-passed budget. Republicans are looking for any excuse they can find to try to justify their cruel legislation that robs from the poor while giving huge handouts to the richest Americans, and now they are settling with the “morality of working” argument. The linguistic tricks won’t fool anyone for too long, as Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Republican House speaker Mike Johnson believes that it was his moral obligation to kick 15 million people off of Medicaid, the low income health insurance program that keeps millions of people in this country from dying of preventable diseases each year. And Mike Johnson's budget that Republicans passed in the house last week. Of course, it's running into some roadblocks in the Senate. However, Johnson says that it was moral to kick these people off, which also, by the way, he's totally not kicking them off. He's just making these able-bodied young men get to work. Here is what happened over the weekend. Of course, he appeared on Face the Nation with host Margaret Brennan and Margaret Brennan asked Johnson quote, we looked at your home state and the projection is that nearly 200,000 louisianans lose their Medicaid coverage. How do you defend that to your constituents? Which by the way is a great question, right?

Like, Hey, you just voted to screw over 200,000 of your own constituents here. What the hell man? And how the Republican speaker of the House responded, we have not cut Medicaid and we have not cut Snap. What we're doing, Margaret is working on fraud, waste, and abuse. And everyone in Louisiana and around the country understand that that's a responsibility at Congress. Now, he says more, but let me stop right there. Republicans, including Donald Trump, by the way, are using these linguistic tricks, right? Like we're not cutting Medicaid, we're not cutting Snap. We're we're just getting rid of, rid of waste, fraud and abuse. Waste fraud and abuse has become this big boogeyman that Republicans like hell, they love that as much as they're boogeyman of DEI. And they use that as an excuse like, well, we had to kick these people off. Why? Well, it was fraud.

And then there's no follow ups until six months later when reports come out like, oh, by the way, these people weren't actually committing fraud. And for the record, one of the things that these people consider fraud is when Medicaid recipients or SNAP recipients are underpaid, right? Like, we were gonna give you $200, but instead we accidentally, the government screwed up, we gave you 150. Well, that's fraud. That, by the way, is literally in their own reports. Underpayments, where the people get screwed is fraud. So you gotta kick 'em off. We already screwed you once, now we're just kicking you off the program. But they want to talk about all of this and maintain that we're not cutting these programs. The budget doesn't cut these programs. And to a degree, that is linguistically true. Instead, what the budget does

Is it directs the committees that oversee these programs to cut 880 billion, like find something to cut 880 billion from committee that works with Medicaid, and then they will cut it from Medicaid, but it's not explicitly said in the bill. Same thing with the SNAP program. So again, they're using these linguistic tricks to make you think that what is happening isn't actually happening because they didn't say it out loud because we didn't put it in writing. It's not what it is, even though it's absolutely going to be what it is. But Johnson continued. You've got about 4.8 million people on Medicaid right now nationwide, who are able-bodied workers, young men, for example, who are not working, who are taking advantage of the system. If you are able to work and you refuse to do so, you're defrauding the system, you're cheating the system, and no one in the country believes that.