Medicaid And Discomfort
Politix
Politix
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2025
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
They won’t come right out and say it this time, the way they did in 2017. But Republicans are still hellbent on repealing the Affordable Care Act—or at least the half of the ACA that expanded Medicaid coverage to millions more poor and disabled Americans.
In this episode, Matt and Brian discuss:
* What do Republican pronouncements about their aspirational health care cuts actually mean?
* Will cuts to a program that benefits millions of Trump supporters, and that basically nobody in industry supports, create disarray among House and Senate Republicans?
* How should Democrats and industry stakeholders alike go about clarifying the stakes, so that Republicans might balk?
Then, behind the paywall, the ACA meant to expand Medicaid in every state. But the Supreme Court decided it was unconstitutional for the federal government to force states to adopt policy under threat of massive, peripheral spending cuts. Since that’s the law of the land, shouldn’t Democratic governors err on the side of fighting Trump, rather than capitulating to his extortionate threats? What counts as fair-game cooperation with the Trump administration, and what counts as caving? And do Democrats need to be mindful of the underlying issue, or should they fight everywhere the law’s on their side?
All that, plus the full Politix archive are available to paid subscribers—just upgrade your subscription and pipe full episodes directly to your favorite podcast app via your own private feed.
Further reading:
* Matt on not letting the awfulness of the GOP tax-and-Medicaid agenda slip through the cracks.
* Brian on why Democratic governors like Gretchen Whitmer should stop Paul Weissing themselves.
* Resources to help citizens with Republican representatives effectively oppose Medicaid cuts.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I don't know why these great planes, Republicans, are more open to expansion than the southern ones. |
| 0:04.4 | My suspicion is that this is, it's about being racist. |
| 0:09.6 | Yeah. |
| 0:10.8 | I'm happy to solve the mystery for you. |
| 0:18.7 | Hey, everyone. |
| 0:19.6 | You're listening to a free preview of the politics podcast. This week, Republican |
| 0:24.1 | efforts to gut Medicaid are starting to come into focus and to attract real public attention. |
| 0:30.3 | So we're going to kick things off with a look at what Republicans hope to pull off, how they're |
| 0:36.5 | trying to conceal their true intentions, |
| 0:39.3 | the messy intra-GOP politics of all this, and the state of the opposition. |
| 0:45.5 | Then Medicaid was actually at the center of an Obama-era legal controversy about whether the |
| 0:50.8 | federal government could use money or the threat of spending cuts to coerce |
| 0:56.2 | states into adopting policies they might otherwise not agree with. So now that Trump's |
| 1:01.8 | all coercion all the time, we'll look at how Democrats and various other entities are responding |
| 1:08.5 | to Trump's coercive threats and whether playing along with him makes any |
| 1:12.4 | sense in light of what the law is. We'll get to all of those questions and more in this episode. |
| 1:18.4 | If you want to hear the whole conversation, you can upgrade your subscription to paid at |
| 1:21.6 | politics.fm. |
| 1:31.2 | Hey, everyone. Welcome to the politics podcast. I'm Brian Boiler. |
| 1:39.6 | I'm Matthew Iglesias. I'm back. Back. Last week, you had fascinating conversation with a very distinguished guest. |
| 1:52.9 | I got to say, you sounded like shit, Brian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, a quick apology to listeners about the audio quality on my half of last week's conversation with Paul Krugman. |
| 2:00.8 | Our recording platform flipped me back from like an external mic to the built-in one on this monitor. |
... |
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