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The Republican speaker of the House says his party is going to achieve its deeply unpopular cuts to Medicaid via the “moral component” of protecting manhood.
Speaker Mike Johnson went on “Face the Nation” on Sunday and defended the House’s passage of a bill that institutes massive cuts — potentially $880 billion over 10 years — to Medicaid, a program 1 in 5 Americans rely on, claiming there are no cuts. Rather, he said, Republicans’ new work requirements are meant to end “fraud, waste and abuse” by forcing “able-bodied workers, young men” to get a job.
In the interview, Johnson responded to a question about the potential widespread loss of health care, including tens of thousands of people who stand to lose health care in his home state, by baselessly insisting the only people who stand to be impacted by the GOP’s proposals are “able-bodied workers, many of whom are refusing to work because they’re gaming the system.”
“You’re cheating the system,” the speaker said at one point. “And no one in the country believes that that’s right. So there’s a moral component to what we’re doing. And when you make young men work, it’s good for them, it’s good for their dignity, it’s good for their self-worth, and it’s good for the community that they live in.”
Even if one takes as gospel Johnson’s suggestion that U.S. policymakers should be making an individual’s access to health care contingent on their “dignity” or “self-worth,” his framing this around young men arguably meets the literal definition of sexism.
But more fundamentally, the speaker and the Trump administration are relying on shoddy logic to make their argument for work requirements. Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik explained recently how the GOP’s rhetoric about a purported crisis of jobless men grifting off the Medicaid system is rooted in years of propaganda that has portrayed people who rely on such programs as leeches — even though the real data tells a different story.
Hiltzik wrote:
Work rules for Medicaid are the product of a misconception about Medicaid enrollees, which is that they’re the employable unemployed. According to census figures, however, 44% of Medicaid recipients worked full time in 2023 and 20% worked part time. An additional 12% were not working because they were taking care of family at home, 10% were ill or disabled, 6% were students, and 4% were retired. Of the remaining 4%, half couldn’t find work and the remaining 2% didn’t give a reason.
In other words, a majority of the people who receive Medicaid are already working.
An estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found the proposed cuts could leave at least 8.6 million people without health care by 2034. And that seems to be at least part of the reason 76% of Americans oppose major cuts to Medicaid, according to polling the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted in April.
But Republican lawmakers, many of whom are white-collar workers who’ve spent years receiving taxpayer-subsidized health care via their government jobs, have been trying to convince American men that the path to true manhood is only achieved through struggle — whether that’s via a return to grueling factory work or, according to Johnson, to retain one’s access to Medicaid.
This manipulative politicking, which teaches that true manhood means suffering, is a primary reason I’ve taken an interest in chronicling what I’ve come to call “MAGA masculinity” over the past year or so. Last year, I released a series on hypermasculinity in the conservative movement that focused on the podcasters and political figures who seem intent on using some men’s self-esteem and a perpetual sense of victimhood to advance conservative values.
This post I wrote, about how the MAGA movement’s hypermasculine ideals threaten men’s health, seems quite relevant in light of Johnson’s focus on what he calls “able-bodied” young men as waste and fraud where Medicaid is concerned.
For more on how the MAGA movement has weaponized manhood, check out my appearance on MSNBC with Alex Witt last month that focused heavily on the topic: