GOP seeks cover from the Big Beastly Bill (The Republican Editorials)

The following editorial is from the opinion page of The Republican newspaper in Springfield. It reflects views of the newspaper’s leadership and not necessarily those of MassLive. Readers are invited to share their opinions by emailing to letters@repub.com.

The “Big Beautiful Bill” is becoming so unpopular that Republicans are already working to rebrand it.

Three Trump 2024 campaign leaders met with Congressional Republican leaders last week in hopes of dreaming up a new name for the president’s main domestic policy action, which became law in July.

They are running from the law because regular people will be stiffed, and legal immigrants will suffer.

Massachusetts officials have begun to calculate the number of residents who will lose health insurance coverage next year and in the years to come, because of the law. The best guess so far is that more than 250,000 Massachusetts residents could eventually go without health care coverage because of the Big Beautiful Bill.

For starters, 34,000 Massachusetts residents will lose health insurance on Dec. 31 because they no longer qualify for federal Medicaid coverage. These are legal immigrants – people who followed the rules, went through the correct portals – but will be excised from Medicaid coverage because they have not been in the United States for five years and make too little money.

Many of those 34,000 Massachusetts residents are the ones roofing and painting our houses, caring for our elderly, cooking our meals and cleaning our homes.

On top of that, another 5,000 young adults in Massachusetts who are part of the DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) will no longer qualify for federal Medicaid help and might go without health insurance. Their coverage ended last month.

Under the Big Beautiful Bill, the estimated 500,000 DACA recipients in the U.S. no longer qualify for marketplace coverage using federal money.

That bad news was followed by worse. The Department of Homeland Security wants to make sure DACA recipients have no immigration protection at all. DHS officials wrote in a letter to U.S. senators that DACA “does not confer any form of legal status in this country” to adults brought to this country as children.

Back in 2012, these “Dreamers” were afforded protection from being deported because it wasn’t their fault they arrived here as children.

The health care trickle-down effect will be inevitable. People without health insurance will still get sick and get hurt. When those 34,000 immigrants – remember, these are folks who followed the rules – get sick, they will stay home. Same with the injured workers.

Fewer people working means less money being made, which means fewer taxes being paid.

Everyone else not immediately affected by Medicaid cuts will be asked to carry a heavier burden. We will pay more to hospitals, because those institutions are the health insurers of last resort. We will pay more to community care clinics whose mission is to care for the poor.

No wonder Republicans want to change the name of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. They went with alliteration, so we will too: This big bill was burdensome, beastly, barbaric, bleak and butt ugly.

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