Medicaid 'gamers' are the new 'welfare queens'
Republicans are taking strawman arguments to absurd extremes.
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Earlier this month, Donald Trump and congressional Republicans passed a grotesque budget bill that (partially) funds massive tax breaks for the wealthy and a ramped-up ICE goon squad by cutting cutting $1.1 trillion from Medicaid and an additional $185 billion from federal food assistance programs, all while adding $2.8 trillion to the deficit.
Not surprisingly, the bill is massively unpopular. As a result, Republicans are gaslighting Americans about its impact, particularly regarding the cuts to Medicaid, which are expected to cost 10 million Americans their health coverage.
The Medicaid cuts could result in more than 16,000 extra deaths per year, researchers say. Republicans have tried to distract from that reality with a combination of blatant lies and misdirecting rhetoric. To hear them tell it, they’re only cutting supposed waste, fraud, and abuse. So when you lose benefits, they’re here to explain why it’s probably your own damn fault.
The lazy gamer myth
Republican messaging surrounding Medicaid cuts borrows heavily from Ronald Reagan’s playbook.
During his first presidential run in 1976, Reagan attacked what he called a “broken” welfare system with shocking stories about abuse and fraud. He described public housing complexes with gyms and swimming pools. Reagan’s stump speech repeatedly mentioned “a woman from Chicago” who enjoyed a flamboyant lifestyle on the taxpayer’s dime.
“In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record,” Reagan said at a 1976 campaign rally. “She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.” (That’s almost a million dollars in today’s money.)
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The “woman from Chicago” who Reagan cited at almost every campaign stop was Linda Taylor, who the Chicago Tribune labeled a “welfare queen,” a term it used in more than 80 different stories. The Tribune reported that Taylor drove a Cadillac and vacationed in Hawaii. Taylor was in fact an unrepentant grifter, and the New York Times ran a photo of her showing up in court wearing a fur coat. She was eventually convicted in 1977 of welfare fraud, although Reagan vastly inflated the true total of her theft (it was more like $40,000 over several years). Most importantly, Taylor represented a vanishingly small percentage of those who legitimately received government assistance.
Reagan didn’t win the 1976 primary, but the damage was done. His cynical picture of indolent wastrels sponging off a corrupted welfare state helped turn blue-collar white voters against the Democratic Party and enabled his later assault on the social safety net.
Flash forward to today, and Republicans are shamelessly spinning these massive Medicaid cuts as only impacting the laziest bums you can imagine. A couple weeks ago, CNN’s Scott Jennings claimed, “There are like almost five million able-bodied people on Medicaid who simply choose not to work. They spend six hours a day socializing and watching television. And if you can't get off grandma's couch and work, I don't want to pay for your welfare."
The Congressional Budget Office confirms that 4.8 million Medicaid recipients who’ll lose benefits under Trump’s bill are technically “able-bodied,” but there’s no evidence they “choose” not to work. In fact, the CBO points out that the reason these people might lose benefits is because they’ll struggle to navigate the reporting requirements with the state and become hopelessly entangled in red tape. The “lazy TV watchers” trope is an insidious lie.
Shortly before the vote for Trump’s monstrosity, Rep. Andy Ogles told podcaster Benny Johnson, “The people that are getting off Medicaid are people that shouldn't be on Medicaid to begin with. It’s the loser in his mama's basement playing video games instead of going out and getting a job.”
Ogles is from Tennessee, where more than 1.5 million people rely on the state’s Medicaid program. It’s doubtful even a fraction of that number are perfectly healthy and concerned only with beating their top score on Fortnite. But his repulsive remarks are a Republican mantra.
House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed Trump’s bill will “return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day.” GOP Majority Whip Tom Emmer posted on social media, “able-bodied individuals who choose to play video games and watch TV rather than work should NOT receive the same Medicaid coverage as single mothers, disabled people, and low-income senior citizens.” GOP Majority Leader Steve Scalise proclaimed before the bill was passed that “the 35-year-old who's sitting in his mom's basement playing video games is gonna have to go get a job again."
Perhaps most absurdly, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins suggested this month that these video-game goof offs could keep their benefits by replacing the critical farm workers Trump’s ICE gestapo is cruelly deporting.
“When you think about there are 34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program, there are plenty of workers in America,” Rollins said.
The “welfare queen” demographic that Reagan smeared wasn’t considered a likely part of the Republican electorate. Relatively young male “gamers,” on the other hand, represent a demo that has steadily shifted right over the past decade. Republicans are effectively peeing in their own electoral pool.
But Republicans consider it more politically expedient to paint an image of free-riding “able-bodied” Medicaid recipients than engage with reality. Data shows that the people they’re actually talking about are are mostly women over the age of 40 with a high school degree or less. Many are caring for a parent or adult child or spouse living with a disability. That’s who will end up suffering from these Medicaid cuts.
Don’t let them eat carrot cake
When they’re not insisting that anybody who loses healthcare as a result of their regressive legislation had it coming, Republicans are telling people with preexisting conditions or illnesses that they need to simply bootstrap their way to healthiness.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, former heart surgeon turned kook talk show host, currently oversees the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Last week, he went on Fox News to “celebrate” the 60th anniversary of Medicare. The timing was perverse, considering that Trump’s bloated bill will kick millions of Americans off the program.
Notably, Oz repeated almost verbatim Scott Jennings’s line about “able-bodied” Medicaid recipients who refuse to work.
“When the program was created 60 years ago, it never dawned on anyone that you would take able-bodied individuals who could work and put them on Medicaid,” Oz said on Fox & Friends. “Today the average able-bodied person on Medicaid who doesn’t work, they watch 6.1 hours of TV or just hang out. That’s not fair. Go out and try to get a job."
Fox & Friends obviously didn’t fact check Oz, so here we go: According to independent healthcare researcher KFF, 64 percent of Medicaid recipients under the age of 65 work full or part time. Those who don’t aren’t all deadbeats — many are students, caretakers, or have an illness or disability themselves. Medicaid recipients don’t receive a monthly check. Medicaid pays medical and nursing home bills. It’s also far more difficult to qualify for it than Republicans would have you believe.
During a appearance later that same day on Stuart Varney’s Fox Business show, Oz brought a carrot cake — his idea of a healthful option — to commemorate Medicare’s anniversary. But he then cast shade on Americans who eat sweets.
“Be vital, do the most you can do to really live up to your God-given potential, to live a full and healthy life,” he said. “And you know, don’t eat carrot cake, eat real food.”
Unlike the imaginary meals hungry children might have to settle for thanks to the GOP’s massive cuts to SNAP benefits, carrot cake is “real food.” But Oz’s callousness reinforces his administration’s Darwinistic approach to public health.
Oz also said this with a straight face while his boss, Donald Trump, famously lives on a diet of fast food burgers, fried chicken, and pizza. His campaign manager Corey Lewandowski detailed in his book “Let Trump Be Trump” that the president would often order from McDonald’s two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, and a chocolate milkshake.
Trump famously doesn’t exercise, believing the debunked Victorian-era theory that the human body is like a battery with a finite amount of energy. But of course, Trump is wealthy and entitled so he doesn’t have to meet the rigid standards Oz expects from the poor.
Oz told Varney, “We’re all in it together Stuart, which means we’ll be there for you, the American people, when you need help with Medicaid and Medicare, but you got to stay healthy as well.” But the point of healthcare coverage is that it’s supposed to help you when you’re sick, not only be available to those who do everything they can to avoid seeing a doctor altogether.
Ever since Reagan’s “welfare queens” smear took hold, Republicans have consistently presented poverty as a moral failing, but now they’ve extended it to physical health. Medicaid recipients are somehow simultaneously too lazy and/or sick to deserve care.
Republicans, however, don’t let facts and even basic decency get in the way of their messaging strategy. They recognize that people will feel pain from their terrible bill, so they are preemptively slandering their future victims. It’s low even for the party of Trump.
That’s it for today
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They are using the language of abusers who aim to demean their victims and lower their self-esteem.
Infuriating how these demeaning false myths keep perpetuating… sad because it hits the grievance “g” spot so well