When you've lost Steve Bannon
-
A quiet rebellion among Republicans representing working-class and low-income areas against President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda has picked up some powerful new allies: US hospitals and conservative agitator Steve Bannon.
The party’s leaders have worked to placate budget hawks and Republicans in high-tax and high-income areas who have dominated the GOP debate over the extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and the corresponding cost-cutting crusade led by billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s most prominent adviser.
Now the party’s biggest target — the Medicaid health-care system that insures 72 million low income and disabled people — threatens Trump’s agenda in a House where only a few Republican defectors could sink it.
On Thursday, Bannon, a former Trump adviser who has emerged as Musk’s loudest conservative critic, warned Republicans against taking a “meat ax” to the program to pay for Trump’s priorities.
“Medicaid, you gotta be careful,” Bannon said on his Thursday podcast. “Because a lot of MAGAs are on Medicaid, I’m telling you. If you don’t think so, you are dead wrong.”
But the House Republicans’ budget blueprint unveiled this week would indeed slash Medicaid, directing the committee that oversees the program to find at least $880 billion worth of spending cuts over the next decade.
Those cuts — if all directed at Medicaid — would account for about 10% of annual funding for it and threaten to affect state budgets, hospital finances and individual benefits.
For his part, Trump has promised the government health-insurance program won’t be cut.
“We’re not going to do anything with that, unless we find some abuse or waste,” Trump said in January. “The people won’t be affected. It will only be more effective and better.”
The American Hospital Association, whose political action committee spent some $1.8 million in the 2024 election cycle, on Friday implored Congress to reject those cuts.
https://fortune.com/2025/02/16/steve-bannon-us-hospitals-republicans-congress-medicaid-cuts-maga/
