The two dumb myths in the GOP's messaging on Medicaid cuts [audio]

MAGA man called my show to say it's not about "29-year-olds playing video games in basement" but is about getting "illegals" off Medicaid. It's about neither.

As the GOP has tried to justify cuts to Medicaid—and the enormously unpopular big, bad, bill—we’ve heard repeatedly that the cuts target “waste, fraud and abuse.” Increasingly, we’ve heard and still hear it’s only about getting “able-bodied” mostly “young men” who are not working and are “playing video games” in their mothers’ “basements” off of Medicaid.

The age of the basement dweller changes—sometimes 25, sometimes 32, sometimes 29—but the same talking point permeates among Republicans.

That’s actually the message they’re peddling above the radar on the TV talk shows. It’s feeble—after all, how many 29-year-old basement dwellers could there possibly be and how are these generally healthy people a drain on the system?—but it’s all the Republicans have as they try to stem the damage with independents, moderates and the many of their own voters who are on Medicaid themselves.

The GOP knows that their its other, more racist message, about getting “illegal” immigrants off Medicaid is well, racist, and is easily debunked. But it plays when they feed it directly to the hardcore in the MAGA base.

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An example of this misinformation working with some of the base occurred as I was discussing the pathetic claim about the basement dwellers on my SiriusXM program, having played the clips. A MAGA man called the show—Gary from Chicago—saying that the “basement dweller” wasn’t the real reason. It’s kind of odd for a Republican to contradict the Republican talking point. But that’s because of the other message about “illegals” the GOP has used, sometimes above the radar but mostly in the cesspool of MAGA platforms, which Gary then promoted.

I had to school Gary on the facts, and you can listen to it here. (Let me know your thoughts!)

That messaging claims that the cuts are about getting “illegal aliens” off of Medicaid. It came from the White House on down through MAGA, claiming there were 1.4 million undocumented immigrants on Medicaid—which is absolutely false. The bill itself even claims this, burying it in the 1000 pages, even though it’s not true in the slightest.

Undocumented immigrants cannot get regular Medicaid, and are only covered for emergency Medicaid sometimes, as many fact checks have shown.

Both the basement dweller claim and the “illegals” claim are completely derelict. The big, bad bill will cause millions of Americans to lose health care, and they know it according the abysmal polling of the bill.