On the Line interviewed Shaine Truscott, a Vice President for SEIU 775, which represents over 55,000 caregivers across Washington, Montana, and Alaska. We spoke about the attacks on Medicaid by the Trump administration and billionaire agenda, what it would mean for working people, and why we need to organize and fight back against them. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jeff Rosenberg (JR): The billionaires and the Trump administration have put a major target on medicaid cuts as part of the big billionaire bill they are pushing through Congress right now. Can you tell us what is happening with these attacks and how your union is understanding them?
Shaine Truscott (ST): 100% of our members rely on Medicaid funding, both through state and federal budgets, to do their jobs to take care of their clients who are elderly and disabled individuals living in our communities. And right now that funding for Medicaid for the work that they do for the care that we all rely on is under direct attack by Republicans in Congress so that they can give tax breaks to their billionaire friends.
JR: How are the politicians justifying these cuts and how are they going about making it harder for people to access healthcare?
ST: What Republicans in Congress will tell you is that they’re trying to go after waste, fraud and abuse in the Medicaid system. We know that there isn’t $715 billion worth of waste, fraud, and abuse in the most foundational and the most efficient health care insurance system that we have in this country – which is Medicaid.
Medicaid covers anyone from elderly people, poor people, children, working class people, even some veterans. And the system is incredibly efficient. We know that they are chipping away at this foundational health care system by putting up red tape barriers, making it harder for people to re-enroll, making it harder for people to get coverage in the first place by imposing work requirements, and reducing the overall funding that they spend on this system by kicking people off the rolls.
And on top of that, they’re going after some of our most vulnerable populations. Trans and non-binary folks are going to see their gender affirming care eliminated if their care is federally funded right now. They are going after states that provide care to undocumented immigrants by imposing penalties and fines on those states.
And they are doing all of this not to create more efficiencies in government. We know that there’s not much more efficiency to create in Medicaid. They’re doing all of this so that they can extend tax breaks for billionaires. We are looking at folks who are in the top 0.1% of our country’s wealth getting an extra $100,000 a year in tax breaks as a direct result of these cuts.
They will somehow say that they are making these cuts in order to protect care for the most vulnerable. We work with the people who are the most vulnerable, who are covered by Medicaid, and they are going to be hurt by this. What this system needs, what these folks need is more funding, not less. You cannot protect anyone by taking a $715 billion sledgehammer to Medicaid.