Hawley urges republicans not to cut Medicaid as house debates reductions

WASHINGTON — Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., on Monday urged his Republican colleagues to reject deep cuts to Medicaid as part of legislation to implement President Donald Trump’s ambitious domestic agenda, including a plan to cut more than $4 trillion in taxes.

In an opinion piece published in The New York Times, Hawley declared that cutting funding for a program that provides health insurance to more than 70 million low-income Americans, including 1 million people in his state, would be “morally wrong” and “politically suicidal.”

“Republicans need to open their eyes: Our voters support social insurance programs,” Hawley wrote. “More than that, our voters depend on those programs.”

His plea comes a day after House Republicans released a plan that would cut an estimated $715 billion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act and could leave 8.6 million people uninsured, although the proposal does not include the more drastic cuts that fiscal hard-liners were demanding. He argued his opposition to the cuts aligns with Trump’s own repeated promises to not “touch” the program in any way.

He also has accused Republican institutionalists of prioritizing the interests of wealthy Americans and corporations at the expense of the working-class voters who formed the wave of populism that sent Trump to the White House. Unlike most of his party, Hawley has refrained from calls to extend the corporate tax cuts that Trump enacted in his first term, saying he was skeptical that they did much to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States or incentivize corporations to treat workers better.

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