MAGA Pulls a Maritza Rivera with Lies about Medicaid Cuts

MAGA’s disgusting budget bill cuts Medicaid out from under working poor families all over this country, and is expected to result in something like 16 million people losing their Medicaid health insurance. This will likely lead to death, disability and higher emergency costs, and a vast expansion of widespread financial misery and bankruptcy due to medical bills. It is a moral and humanitarian disgrace. 

I don’t have much novel to say about the Medicaid portion of the bill itself that hasn’t been said by other national commentators. Like many of you, I’ve just been grieving the loss that this represents for people all over this land, and the stress this will put on some of my own loved ones. And it is just such an ugly indictment of the callous coalition that put a soulless tryin’-to-be-an-autocrat in the White House.

I’m writing today, however, because I noticed a disturbing parallel to Seattle politics.

This weekend I was on a run and listening to a podcast discussion between President Biden’s former Press Secretary Jen Psaki and President Obama’s Communications Chief Dan Pfeiffer.

So, you know, not exactly left wing radicals.

In their discussion, Psaki said that Trump is claiming his huge cuts to Medicaid aren’t really Medicaid Cuts. 

Just in case you haven’t been following the details of this sordid budget affair–the Medicaid cuts come through “work requirements.” The trick is that this has been tried in Alabama. It turns out that “work requirements” just means “byzantine paperwork” and then that people miss deadlines and lose Medicaid - even though many of them are, in fact, working. It also turns out it doesn’t increase employment, but it does decrease health care coverage. 

These cuts are going to harm the working poor–by design.

But, apparently since they won’t be directly removed from the rolls by the bill- instead, they will be removed after a paperwork failure that we know will happen, Trump is saying –SEE IT’S NOT A CUT. 

I thought that sounded vaguely familiar. Then this forty seconds of the podcast jogged my memory:

(Transcript)

Jen Psaki

Trump has always been a liar but now it is like everybody's lying he's lying like that report the other day a couple days ago about how he was in private in the caucus meeting and he said there are three things you can't touch, social security, one something else, and Medicaid and it's like…

Dan Pfeiffer 

…social security Medicare and Medicaid yeah Medicare, Medicaid yeah

Jen Psaki

…and somebody in the room like a Republican member was like, “we are touching Medicaid” and it's like, is he lying to himself? He's not a policy wonk, but like you have to be basically dead not to see like what the cuts are. It's like, how do you combat that? Because it is pushing this complete gaslighting into the public and that's what the Democrats are fighting against. 

When Psaki said “gaslighting” it all came back to me. 

This harkened back to when the Seattle Times said Seattle City Councilmember Maritza Rivera was engaged in “what felt like gaslighting” about Rivera’s own attempts to cut funding for a program to fund housing, childcare, and health clinics in marginalized communities of color. 

If you don’t remember, Rivera wanted to layer in requirements that news commentators and advocates alike all agreed would result in cuts to many projects. But the cuts were not formally statutorily mandated - they were, instead, contingent-but-certain, just like the Medicaid cuts.

The applicants wouldn’t be directly cut - they would instead have their funding made contingent on reaching a bunch of unreachable goalposts, which would then certainly result in cuts. Like Trump, Rivera insisted they were not cuts. Worse, she went on to say that the three hours of testimony from black and brown community leaders about her budget proviso was the result of misinformation.

One of those leaders, the head of the NAACP for King County, said this budget proviso was: “a slap in the face” of the African American Community, “tone deaf at best, something more insidious at worst.”

In an extra bit of irony, this all followed less than a year after a public reprimand Rivera received from the Democratic Party. During her campaign (we were running against one another), the Democratic party called out Rivera for gaslighting voters. And when I said at the time that this was the use of a MAGA tactic - Rivera and her allies complained they were shocked, just SHOCKED, that anyone could say such a thing. 

And yet here we are, a year later, with Donald Trump himself, saying a contingent-but-certain cut to critical benefits for people living on the margins isn’t a cut. This is exactly what Rivera did with her budget provisio that targeted the equitable development initiative.

And of course, just like Sara Nelson and her acolytes like Rivera on the council–Trump’s main motivation is to fund a budget that relies on low taxes for the rich.

Now, I have been accused, and surely will be again here, of saying these folks are MAGA. I have not made this accusation, and I am not making this accusation. I presume, unlike MAGA, they support LGBTQ and abortion rights, though they won’t deign to budget much money to support these). They likely support due process, immigration, and federal funding of science. And of course the scale of cuts to the equitable development initiative and the Medicaid cuts is not really comparable.

But, the analogy still holds and it is morally damning. 

1. Rivera still tried to take a bunch of funding for critical needs away from marginalized people, just like the GOP bill. 

2. And just like Trump, the funding cut was functionally certain, even though it involved some contingent-but-wholly-predictable-steps. 

3. All of this was in favor of a view of the world that prioritizes lower taxes for the rich over spending on the marginalized.

4. And just like Trump, she lied through her teeth to the public about it, and mainstream Democrats called it gaslighting.

So no, not MAGA. Just very happy to use some of MAGAs morally bankrupt tactics. Psaki was right -  that's what the Democrats are fighting against. And we should fight it in Seattle just like we fight it in the other Washington.

While Rivera may be among the most dishonest of the bunch, it’s worth noting that her election and her cuts-for-the-poor-and-low-taxes-for-the-rich legislative priorities were bought and paid for by the same rich people that backed Sara Nelson, Rob Saka, Bob Kettle and Bruce Harrell. 

Bruce has, thank goodness, been a touch more moderate than the rest, but he has still spent most of his unproductive political career shielding these corporate donors from taxes while cutting a hundred million from affordable housing.

To echo Psaki again, this is what Democrats are fighting against.

Image Credit: Cascade PBS