Republicans Are Cutting Medicare. Not Only Medicaid, Medicare. [View all]

[justaprogressive]

It’s always appropriate to bet on the House Freedom Caucus caving to their leader Donald Trump. That’s what happened at 3:20 a.m. this morning, when various assurances, including a potential second reconciliation bill for the 2026 fiscal year, flipped all of them to yes on the Republican mega-bill, which takes food and medicine away from the most vulnerable people in America to give the wealthiest a tax cut.

Those Freedom Caucus members, and all but one member of the Republican caucus, voted early this morning on the rule governing debate on the bill. Before the vote on final passage, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries unleashed an epic speech that has passed the six-hour mark and is still going. It is a kind of talking filibuster, afforded through the tradition of the “magic minute” granted to the opposition leader. But it is just delaying the inevitable: Republicans have the votes in the House to pass the Senate bill unchanged, after several members spent a week railing against the betrayal of changes made that added more debt, weakened the phaseout of clean-energy tax credits, inserted a corrupt deal that will incentivize states to make more payment errors in their SNAP program, and deepened cuts to Medicaid, which will bring the health system to the brink of devastation.


But now Republicans have created another problem. They didn’t just cut Medicaid; they also have forced nearly half a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicare, the health program for the elderly.

Because of a statutory requirement to automatically impose budget cuts when legislation increases the deficit, the Big Beautiful Bill would require automatic sequestration cuts across the board, something that has been confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) but has been largely absent from the debate over the bill. Medicare is one of the programs that will face the axe, and the damage sums to $490 billion over the next ten years, starting in the next fiscal year that begins in October. While many of the safety-net cuts in the bill are delayed to help Republicans with their re-election campaigns, the Medicare cuts must begin next year.

The Statutory Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) Act of 2010 requires the Office of Management and Budget to keep scorecards that track the cumulative effects of legislation on the budget deficit, based on estimates from the CBO. The Senate version of the Big Beautiful Bill adds roughly $3.3 trillion in debt over the next ten years. That will have to be made up through automatic sequestration cuts.

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-03-republicans-cutting-medicare-not-only-medicaid/