Poll: Massive Voter Rejection Of Medicaid And Food Stamp Cuts

Poll: Massive Voter Rejection Of Medicaid And Food Stamp Cuts

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise

A new Civiqs poll conducted for Daily Kos should give Republicans a serious case of heartburn.

The survey, which was fielded February 28 to March 3, finds that 63 percent of registered voters oppose the idea of cutting programs like Medicaid and food stamps that help low-income Americans. Those are the same two programs Republican lawmakers plan to slash in order to pay for President Donald Trump's tax cuts for the rich. Half of voters (50 percent) strongly oppose cutting those programs.

The GOP budget blueprint, which passed the House last week with only Republican votes, would require hundreds of billions in cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in order to just partly pay for the GOP's plan to extend the tax cuts they passed in 2017, which overwhelmingly benefit the highest-earning taxpayers.

The new poll finds that nearly every demographic group opposes making cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, which help 72 million Americans afford health care and 42 million Americans put food on the table, respectively.

The cuts are opposed by an overwhelming share of female voters (68 percent), male voters (57 percent), non-college-educated voters (60 percent), college-educated voters (67 percent), urban voters (74 percent), suburban voters (62 percent), rural voters (56 percent), and every age group.

The only major group surveyed that supports the cuts are Republicans, 55 percent of whom support making cuts to those programs. However, that is weak support from a group that usually eats up everything Trump wants.

The poll's results provide insight into why Republicans are lying about the kind of cuts their budget necessitates.

“The word Medicaid is not even in this bill,” Republican Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana said at a news conference on Capitol Hill last week, as he sought to convince his own members to support the budget. “Democrats are lying about … what’s in the bill.”

But Democrats are not lying about the fact that the budget would make steep cuts to Medicaid.

"Their resolution calls for at least, as a floor, $880 billion to be cut by what is under the purview of the Energy and Commerce Committee,” Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, ranking member of the House Budget Committee, explained. “If Energy and Commerce Committee said, 'We don't want to cut Medicaid. Instead, we will cut literally everything else we possibly can, 100 percent,' that only gets you about halfway to the $880 billion. So by definition, they have to, at a minimum, cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid.”

Experts say cuts that steep would leave many at risk of losing their Medicaid coverage.

Indeed, heavily Republican states such as West Virginia, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Arkansas have some of the highest percentages of state residents on Medicaid, according to data from KFF, a nonpartisan organization focused on health policy.

“Everyone who relies on Medicaid would be at risk,” Edwin Park, a research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, told NBC News. “Specifics of the proposal will matter—each state will be hit, and how hard they’ll be hit will vary—but certainly they’re all at risk.”

Protests have cropped up across the country as voters try to convince Republicans not to slash the programs. Over the weekend, people in Alaska, Colorado, New York, and Wisconsin gathered to slam their Republican lawmakers for voting for the bill that necessitates cuts to Medicaid.

Republicans were also met at town halls by angry constituents who oppose Medicaid cuts.

But whether Republicans will listen to voters is another story.

Trump has blessed the GOP proposal with his endorsement, saying, "We need both Chambers to pass the House Budget to ‘kickstart’ the Reconciliation process, and move all of our priorities to the concept of, 'ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL.' It will, without question, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"

And Republicans have shown time and again that if Trump says jump, they say how high.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

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