Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

Last Thursday, dozens of area residents rallied in Central Park to defend Medicaid funding, which Republicans are trying to strip away.

Republicans want to kick millions of people off Medicaid health insurance so that they can give bigger tax breaks to billionaires.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 13.7 million people will lose their insurance under Republicans’ newly unveiled budget plan.

Over one million Minnesotans have Medicaid coverage, and an estimated 230,000 people are in danger of losing it if Republicans pass their proposed cuts. Medicaid currently pays for 30% of hospital births in our state and the majority of nursing home care.

Republicans want to put work requirements in place for people to be eligible for Medicaid coverage. In practice, work requirements prevent people from getting coverage and it’s costly to administer. At a time when the Trump administration is slashing the jobs of people who are fighting cancer, thwarting bird flu, tracking hurricanes and helping residents recover from their aftermath, would this really be a better use of our money?

About two-thirds of Medicaid’s adult enrollees who are non-disabled are currently employed full or part time. Almost everyone else covered by Medicaid is either disabled, in a non-paid caregiving role, ill, retired or enrolled in school. What a “work requirement” would do is yank away coverage from people if they lose their job, effectively removing one more safety net from them.

The goal of the “work requirements” is to boot people off Medicaid, or tie people up in red tape so they can’t access it, but this framing presents denial as a character-building exercise instead of a form of brutality.

The Republican budget proposal puts Medicaid Expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) at risk. Currently the federal government pays for at least 90% of the expansion costs in each state. This expansion has saved thousands of lives and helped keep rural hospitals open by reducing the amount of unpaid medical care.

(Unpaid medical care is the main reason why it’s sound policy for Minnesota to help eligible undocumented workers afford health insurance through MinnesotaCare. If they or their family members need medical care, medical facilities are more likely to receive payment if these patients have MinnesotaCare coverage. Rep. Bennett focuses on people’s immigration status rather than their humanity and our medical centers’ fiscal health in her critique of Minnesota’s program. She is defending wealthy people from taxes, not preventing our services from facing closure.)

According to KFF, nearly 4 in 10 women of reproductive age are covered by Medicaid Expansion. Over 6 in 10 people between the ages of 50 and 64 are covered through Medicaid Expansion.

Medicaid Expansion has been a lifeline to rural areas, and we must protect it from Republicans who want to gut it in service to billionaires. Our Congressman Brad Finstad is one of these members of Congress who prioritizes tax cuts for billionaires over health coverage for his constituents.

Please help protect our rural communities that are far removed from the vacation mansions, extravagant yachts, private jets and other wasteful indulgences of the billionaire class. The toxic influence of extreme wealth has distorted our politics and valorized greed and exploitation.

It is working people who hold this country up, every day. Take away billionaires, and we would still keep going. Take away workers, and everything would grind to a deadening halt.

The cuts that Republicans want to make go far deeper than Medicaid, of course. They are also proposing cuts to Head Start, SNAP (food stamps), heating assistance, broadband access, FEMA, libraries and many other programs that serve our rural communities and increase our quality of life.

Republicans are willing to reduce our quality of life to serve billionaires’ wealth-hoarding agenda.

Democrats invest in people and our communities and make our counties more livable.

We should not be passive about the cuts that Republicans want to make in our communities. Freeborn County has lost 20% of its population since 1970. Albert Lea and all the smaller towns in Freeborn County are below their peak populations.

This population loss is such a head scratcher because this is a nice place to live. We should at least be holding steady if not gaining population. But we are already struggling, and Republican cuts, if they go through, will hurt us even further.

The Biden administration sent a wave of investments into rural America to rebuild infrastructure and Main Street vitality. We simply cannot sit idly by while Trump and Republican majorities in Congress try to strip it all away to give massive tax breaks to billionaires.

Billionaires — and the members of Congress who are beholden to them — are not coming to save us. We are the ones who see each other and stand up for each other.

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.