Medicaid cuts are too big to hide

The GOP has seemingly boundless faith that they can hide their crappy economic policies from Americans . The House Budget Committee passed the reconciliation bill in the middle of the night on Sunday, but the fact that most of the media was in bed will do nothing to fix their larger problem. 

The bill cuts Medicaid for millions of people. If it passes, it will send health care costs soaring, adding one more source of inflation that people will definitely notice. Donald Trump can sign fake executive memos with useless “orders” that claim to reduce drug prices; no one will notice or care. A big debate over Medicaid cuts, however? That will get public attention. 

RFK Jr. wants to take your health care choices away

One of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s favorite claims is that he’s not anti-vaccine, but is instead a“freedom-of-choice person.” Standing Room Only readers are savvy enough to see through that lie but, unfortunately, much of the large public still buys the idea that he just wants people to have choices. But in recent days, Kennedy has shown his true face as a man who wants to take your choices away. 

Right now, you can choose to get regular COVID-19 boosters, a popular option for reality-based people who don’t like getting sick. But Kennedy is taking that choice away from as many people as he can. A new version of the vaccine has completed trials, but Kennedy is only allowing the FDA to approve it for people over 65 or those with an underlying condition. The FDA has also rolled back recommendations that pregnant women and those under 18 shoud get a COVID-19 vaccine at all. For a lot of people, that will mean losing insurance coverage for that vaccine. 

But it isn’t just that Kennedy is breaking his promise not to take vaccines away. He’s also, at the behest of the Christian right, coming after abortion and birth control. As I wrote for Salon on Monday, Kennedy has ordered the FDA to “review” the abortion pill, based on a phony study claiming that it’s not safe. He’s also brought the Means siblings, who are loud opponents of the birth control pill, into HHS, persuading Trump to nominate Casey Means, who doesn’t have a current medical license, as surgeon general. 

Most Americans, when given real choices, prefer modern medical advances like reliable contraception and vaccines. They know that the “old ways” Kennedy expresses so much nostalgic affection for were abandoned because they didn’t work. Kennedy’s talk of “freedom” is a lie. His actions show he wants to take your choices away.

Hey Grok, do a lot of people shop at Walmart?

I highly recommend Heather Digby Parton’s Monday column, in which she compares Trump’s lies about his economy-wrecking tariffs to his efforts to deceive the public about COVID-19, back in early 2020, by juking the numbers and claiming there was no pandemic. She notes that this time around, he’s got more staffers ready to “falsify data and cook the books in order to sell their schemes to the American people.” We got another chilling reminder of that this weekend, when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed that Walmart would eat the cost of tariffs, when the company has already said it intends to raise prices for consumers. 

To add to Digby’s remarks, the reason Trump is so confident that he can lie about the numbers with no consequences is because that’s how he ran his business for decades. I know most people didn’t follow last year’s fraud case closely because the financial details were so dizzying, but the top-line takeaway isn’t complicated: Trump and his family spent decades defrauding both the government and investors by lying about the numbers. They borrowed money by claiming to be worth more than they were — and then dodged taxes by claiming to be worth less than they were. Sometimes the numbers they provide were so far from realitythat you get the feeling they just made it all up as they went along. 

I don’t think it’s being pollyanna-ish to say that strategy probably won’t work this time. Real estate valuations are complex and easy to play accounting games with. People know the price of eggs at Walmart, as the last election established. That’s why the White House toyed with telling people to tighten their belts, but the backlash was so bad they’ve gone back to outright lying. But lying about the prices people face at retail stores every day will be harder to pull off than denying that people were dying by the thousands from COVID-19. 

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What we're reading this week

“The Neo-Anti-Vaxxers Are in Power Now,” Katherine J. Wu, Atlantic

“The Hyper-Aggressive, Comically Loyal Government Flacks Who Talk Like Trump,” Anna Merlan, Mother Jones

“How Did So Many Elected Democrats Miss Biden’s Infirmity?” Michelle Goldberg, New York Times

“Attack of the Sadistic Zombies,” Paul Krugman, Substack

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“Freedom of Choice” by Devo

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