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Opinion: When future generations look back on July 2025, they’ll see this moment when Republicans chose abject cruelty over compassion, writes John Casey
In a shameful display of political malice, Republicans in the Senate have rammed through what they proudly call the “big beautiful bill;” however, it is a monumental betrayal of vulnerable Americans, as well as a death sentence.
Under the banner of permanent tax cuts for Trump’s wealthy cronies and big defense contractor paydays, Republicans in the House and Senate, beholden only to Donald Trump and a ridiculously short deadline, engineered a blueprint to gut Medicaid, slash food stamps, shutter hospitals, and deliberately create more medical and health care deserts.
This is not policy. It’s mass cruelty, and it will have massive, devastating consequences. It will be fatal.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirms the hard truth that the bill will strip health insurance from almost 12 million Americans over the next decade, and possibly more under the Senate’s harsher version. That’s over 11 million lives without coverage, with no checkups, with no treatments, with no chance. When you are not insured, you don’t go to the doctor, you don’t go to the emergency room, you don’t seek proper treatment.
And, if you’re in a rural community, you don’t even have a hospital to go to. Rural communities stand to lose over 300 hospitals, destroying the only lifeline many have to urgent care. There’s lots more pain. More than $860 billion in Medicaid funding will vanish; SNAP support will plummet by nearly $300 billion. Even the American Hospital Association warns that 1.8 million rural residents could lose Medicaid coverage, forcing them to travel hours to the nearest facility.
This isn’t some abstract math by number cruncher. It’s all too real human carnage. Medical associations and the CBO have been sounding the alarm, and hypocritical Christian Republican leaders in Congress have ignored their warnings.
The ramifications will be unmitigated sickness and death. Cancer patients will be denied chemo, children will starve, and pregnant women will die without prenatal care. And if you are poor and sick, you can die from an untreated infection. Couple this with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s plan to water down vaccines — well, wait, the poor won't be able to afford or access them anyway.
I wrote last month how a sick society, full of disease, is part and parcel of an autocracy.
And do you know what else is? When the very rich get richer. This death knell of a bill, and the massive cuts to vital health programs, are all happening to fund giveaways to billionaires. The CBO reports that low-income families will lose roughly $1,600 annually by 2034.
But don’t despair, because the wealthiest Americans will receive windfalls averaging $12,000. This isn’t trickle‑down. Rather, it’s a direct pipeline from poor to plutocrat. Time and again history proves trickle‑down fails. Never works. Never.
But Republicans aren’t thinking “trickle-down.” No, they’re thinking of “tinkle-down” on the downtrodden.
Meanwhile, the Earth bleeds. By repealing the Inflation Reduction Act energy incentives and slashing clean energy credits, this legislation betrays any pretense of climate stewardship. These cuts fly in the face of all the wildfires, droughts, and superstorms that will only rage harder as the Earth warms. Experts warn the bill “will destroy U.S. climate progress.”
The health of our planet is just another casualty in the Republicans' war on the sick.
What is equally sickening is that Republicans have been brazen about it. JD Vance, with a smirk on his face, cast the tie-breaking vote for this murderous legislation to pass. They all stand aligned behind Trump, their “dear leader” who demands every GOP vote to cement these cuts before July 4.
So, in order to make this deadline, they rammed it through the Senate. And while doing so, they’ve spun lies: calling Medicaid abuse “waste,” decrying “illegal” beneficiaries, promising this will protect only the truly needy.
In the coming months, the consequences will get uglier still if this bill becomes law. One or two years from now, we will stand in the charred remains of American health care that will include more suffering, more death, more hunger and illness as desperate people go without a check‑up, go untreated, go uninsured.
What the Republicans and Trump have done is create a horror-show of disgrace. A bipartisan cadre of economists, Nobel laureates, and public health experts decries this as one of the most aggressive safety‑net demolitions in U.S. history. It targets 71 million low‑income and disabled people, according to The Guardian. Even Elon Musk, no longer willing to support the GOP supporters of this bill, has called it a “disgusting abomination.”
If Congress votes to sign this monstrous law, let them watch their legacies sink under the weight of the bodies of hard-working people evicted from safety. Let them answer for every person who died at home, every child who went hungry, every rural town abandoned.
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