Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford made an appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box Thursday and told this whopper about how their “big beautiful” turd of a bill is supposedly not going to take away healthcare from millions of Americans.
LANKFORD: Let me take for instance the Medicaid that everyone’s going crazy over. The Medicaid’s largest part of it. It’s just a work requirement on it.
People are screaming and saying, hey, it’s kicking people off Medicaid. It’s not kicking people off Medicaid. It’s transitioning from Medicaid to employer-provided healthcare.
So yes, we’ve got 10 million people that are not going to be on Medicaid, but they then are going to be on employer-provided healthcare.
We think that’s a better option for the taxpayer and quite frankly for their families as well.
If those people had the option of employer-provided healthcare, that would be great, but most of them don’t. From the Kaiser Family Foundation:
Most Medicaid adults who work are working full-time (at least 35 hours per week), but those who work part-time face challenges to full-time employment (Figure 4). Among Medicaid adults who work, nearly seven in ten (69%) worked full-time and half worked full-time for the entire year (at least 50 weeks) (Appendix Table 2). Many Medicaid adults who work part-time (31% of all workers) cited that reasons for working part-time include work limits like shorter work weeks (less than 35 hours per week) (16%), slack work/business conditions (12%), or inability to find full-time work (7%) (Figure 4). Part-time workers also pointed to childcare problems (9%) and other family or personal obligations (22%).
[…]Many Medicaid adults who work are employed by small firms and are not eligible for employer-sponsored health insurance at their job. In 2023, nearly five in ten (46%) Medicaid workers were employed in firms with fewer than 50 employees, which are not subject to ACA penalties for not offering affordable health coverage and are less likely to offer health insurance to their workers than larger firms (Figure 5). In 2022, just over half (53%) of firms with fewer than 50 employees offered health insurance to their workers compared to 98.7% of firms with 100 or more employees. In addition, many Medicaid workers are employed in industries with historically low ESI offer rates, such as the agriculture and service industries (46%). Among all workers employed in farming, fishing, and forestry occupations, only about four in ten (41.4%) were eligible for insurance at their job in 2023, and among those in service occupations, just over half (55.6%) were eligible (Figure 6). Access to job-based insurance for part-time workers is even more limited. Fewer than four in ten (38.4%) of all part-time workers were eligible for insurance through their job in 2023. But, even if eligible for job-based insurance, some workers, especially low-wage and part-time workers, may not take up the offer because it is not affordable to them.
Republicans know this, but they don’t care how many people they kill as long as they get their tax cuts. Of course, Lankford wasn’t challenged on this by either of the CNBC hosts who just let him lie.
