Trump’s big bad bill that would kill 51,000 not a done deal

WASHINGTON—The Donald Trump-GOP “big beautiful” money bill, which an academic study now reveals would kill 51,000 people unnecessarily each year by 2034, faces rising opposition inside and outside Capitol Hill. Only one part of the national uprising against the bill that is pressuring lawmakers are the planned coast-to-coast demonstrations against it on June 14.

Popular revulsion against the bill is so strong that analysts believe that it is increasingly possible the bill can be defeated the way Obamacare was saved by popular pressure during Trump’s first administration. Trump, in control in the Senate, would have killed the Affordable Care Act back then were it not for the massive uprising against his plans and the last-minute appearance by the ailing then-Sen. John McCain, who, in response to the mass movements, showed up to cast the decisive vote to save it.

People in red districts across the country, horrified by the healthcare cuts, are turning out at town halls and anywhere else they can find their Republican representatives to express opposition to the destruction of Medicaid and the disastrous effects that it will have on healthcare delivery in their communities. As they fear for their prospects of re-election, some of the Republicans in the House are finding ways they can back out of voting for it when it comes back to the House after the vote in the Senate.

Even the notorious conspiracy theorist and Trump supporter, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, is among that group. She admitted to not having read some of the bill before she voted for it, and says she will not vote for it when it returns to the House if an AI provision in the bill is not removed.

The bill says that the states will have no power to regulate AI for ten years. Green says she “did not know” that was in the bill but would have voted against it had she known because “it violates states’ rights.” She made no mention of any concern she has about her constituents losing health care.

Three or possibly four Republican senators—Alaskan Lisa Murkowski, Maine’s Susan Collins, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, and Missouri’s Josh Hawley—are sitting on the fence, undecided about it. Collins, who has a key role to play as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which helps dole out federal cash, thinks it cuts too much, especially from Medicaid. Murkowski has similar concerns.

The other two senators think it cuts too little, even though the House-passed version of the measure, called a “reconciliation” bill, slams Medicaid with an $715 billion eight-to-ten-year cut. That, plus $135 billion in other health care cuts, would help “pay” for Trump’s new $4.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the 1%. Another $2.5 trillion, a non-partisan agency reports, would come from Trump’s high tariffs.

The Republican lawmakers backing the bill favor no cuts in the $1 trillion-plus military budget Trump is pushing.

One other Republican, Kentucky’s Ron Paul, has already flatly said he’ll vote “no” because the measure adds $2.5 trillion over 10 years to the national debt, because it drives the federal deficit up, and because it includes an increase in the U.S. debt limit. The debt limit covers interest on past borrowing..

Meanwhile, outside the Capitol, momentum is building incredibly against the measure. Opposing the reconciliation bill is now one of two centerpieces for the 1,400-and-counting planned demonstrations nationwide on June 14, “No Kings Day.” The other, of course, is a barrage of actions in opposition to Trump’s tyrannical rule and trashing of the U.S. Constitution. 

The June 14 protests will hit the nation from coast to coast June 14, except for D.C. itself. There, Trump plans to glorify himself with a massive parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, complete with tanks and troops, a la totalitarian regimes. June 14 is Flag Day—and his birthday, too. 

A raft of organizations have gotten behind the No Kings Day protests, with Indivisible, the Progressive Democrats of America, and the Working Families Party in the lead. They’re also telling D.C. residents who want to protest Trump’s billionaire bonanza to head for the city’s suburbs, or travel to Philadelphia.

Trump’s tanks are “a spectacle meant to look like strength,” No Kings Day organizers say. “But real power isn’t staged in Washington. It rises up everywhere else. 

“Instead of allowing this birthday parade to be the center of gravity, we will make action everywhere else the story of America that day: People coming together in communities across the country to reject strongman politics and corruption.

“For that reason, NO KINGS is not hosting an event in Washington, D.C. (Their emphasis). We will instead have a major flagship march and rally in Philadelphia to draw a clear contrast between our people-powered movement and the costly, wasteful, and un-American birthday parade in Washington.”

There’s symbolism in that choice, too. While D.C. is the nation’s capital, Philadelphia is where both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were crafted and signed. And it was the U.S. capital city from 1790-1800 as well, while a scattering of buildings were being erected in D.C.

Now the foes of Trump’s legislation have another arrow in their quiver against it: A study by health care professors at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, which reveals the Medicaid cuts would lead to 51,000 unnecessary deaths yearly by 2034, through denial of care.

Sens. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., requested the study. They cite it as yet another reason senators should defeat the “reconciliation” bill.

The Medicaid cuts—and the deaths the researchers say they’d produce—are important. That’s because, as Sanders points out, that spending cut would help fund the Trump-GOP’s 10-year $4.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the 1%. 

Not just bad policy, but immoral

“Let’s be clear. The Republican reconciliation bill, which makes massive cuts to Medicaid in order to pay for huge tax breaks for billionaires, is not just bad public policy. It is not just immoral. It is a death sentence for struggling Americans,” Sanders said in a June 4 statement on releasing the study.

“If this bill becomes law, more than 51,000 Americans will die unnecessarily each and every year. That’s not Bernie Sanders talking. That is precisely what experts at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania found. 

“You throw 13.7 million Americans off health care as they [the Republicans] have. You increase the cost of prescription drugs for low-income seniors, and you make nursing homes throughout America less safe,” he said, citing the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office’s calculations.

The result, Sanders declared, is “not only will some of the most vulnerable people throughout our country suffer, but tens of thousands will die. We cannot allow that to happen.”

Wyden added that “despite some of the callous sarcasm from Republican members of Congress lately, the stakes for this bill are truly life and death for tens of thousands of Americans.

“Taking away health insurance and benefits like home care and mental health care from seniors, people with disabilities, kids, and working families will be deadly. This analysis shows the dire consequences of moving ahead with this morally bankrupt effort.”

But as the Oregonian’s comment reveals, most of the Senate’s ruling Republicans pooh-pooh such projections. Over in the House, it’s ruling Republicans rejected similar warnings, and the reconciliation bill squeaked through 215-214 in late May. It needs 51 “yes” votes to pass the Senate. The GOP holds 53 of the Senate’s 100 seats, and Trump is lobbying senators hard to keep the bill unchanged.

That narrow margin magnifies the importance of the reluctant four Republicans, plus Paul. If four of those five oppose the legislation—and they’re going to be targets for lobbying by foes on one side and Trump on the other—it goes down the drain.

If only three vote “no,” though, Trump’s VP, J.D. Vance, can cast the tie-breaking vote to approve the reconciliation measure.

The researchers told Sanders and Wyden that 7.7 million people would lose Medicaid money or Affordable Care Act marketplace coverage in 2034, as a result of the Medicaid budget cut. That loss, including loss of prescription drug subsidies, would kill 11,300 people, they calculated, using past mortality data.

Another “1.38 million dual-eligible beneficiaries lose Medicaid coverage from disenrollment in the Medicare Savings Programs,” the researchers reported. All the loss figures come from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

Disenrollment alone kills 18,200

The disenrollment, the researchers said, would kill another 18,200 people yearly. The Medicare Savings Programs let those “dual-eligible” Medicaid recipients also receive other federal income aid. They’d be ineligible for Medicaid money, too, a footnote in the study says.

And the reconciliation bill “immediately rescinds” federal safe-staffing standards in hospitals and nursing homes. The Democratic Biden administration promulgated the standards last year after long lobbying led by National Nurses United and other unions—such as AFSCME and the Teachers/AFT—who represent U.S. nursing home workers. 

Since Medicaid and Medicare fund around 50% of all nursing home costs, Medicaid rules on safe staffing carry big weight in the homes’ profits. Those profits increasingly go to nursing home CEOs, for-profit health care chains, and/or venture capitalists. The latter two are snapping up nursing homes at high rates, and both put profits before people. Fewer nurses tending patients equals higher profits for them. 

The study estimated 13,000 more Medicaid patients would die yearly if safe-staffing standards are repealed. The researchers said another provision in reconciliation would end Medicaid coverage for thousands of patients, but still leave them with Medicare—which doesn’t cover everything.

“In addition, the proposed bill fails to extend the enhanced ACA premium tax credits,” the researchers reported. That would “lead to the loss of insurance for another five million people, bringing the total number of uninsured individuals to 13.7 million. We calculate this retraction will cause an additional 8,811 deaths.”

Safe staffing in nursing homes and hospitals has been a top National Nurses United issue for years. Its landmark California law setting specific safe staffing levels by type of care—nurses per patient in an intensive care unit or a nursing home floor, etc.—was enacted 20 years ago. The unions are still fighting for it, state by state as well as nationally. Last month, Nevada’s legislature sent a safe-staffing measure, SB182, to GOP Gov. Joe Lombardo. NNU urges him to sign it.

And the federal Veterans Affairs Department is the largest hospital system in the U.S., so safe staffing is important there, as well as in non-federal hospitals. NNU represents the VA’s registered nurses.

“The science of ratios has demonstrated these” safe staffing “measures improve patient outcomes, and nurses from across the country who’ve worked in California say the ratio limits have a dramatic impact on their working conditions,” the union says.

National Nurses United actually will get a jump on No Kings Day, with a June 6 rally in D.C., with veterans groups and lawmakers, for safe staffing and against the health care cuts Sanders and Wyden denounce. The veterans, who also denounce the bill because of huge Trump cuts in Veterans Affairs Department funding and personnel, are there because June 6 is the anniversary of D-Day. 

NNU and the Teachers/AFT, AFT locals among Chicago community college professors and in New Haven, Conn., and Albuquerque, N.M.,  are among the unions officially backing the No Kings Day marches. Other backers include the Government Employees, the Treasury Employees, the Workers Circle, the Federal Unionists Network—an organization mostly of workers Trump fired—Black Lives Matter, Color of Change, 50501, and peace, pro-Palestinian, and progressive groups of all stripes.

“In the wealthiest country in the world, we should be guaranteeing health care to all as a human right, not taking health care away from millions of seniors and working families to pay for tax breaks for billionaires,” Sanders concluded. He pledged to use his committee post to do “everything that I can to see this disastrous [reconciliation] bill is defeated.”

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