JD Vance’s Surprise Admission About Trump, Medicaid Boomerangs on Him

Then, in a 2017 op ed for The New York Times, Vance argued that the GOP bill would shift large numbers of people “from Medicaid to the private market” without ensuring that they can “meaningfully purchase care in that market”—i.e., they’d lose coverage. Vance suggested that Republicans must stand for “some baseline provision of care” to working-class voters, meaning cuts to Medicaid would betray that principle.

President Trump actively championed that bill at the time. And though the Senate killed it, Vance didn’t forget what it had revealed about Trump and Trumpism. In 2020 private texts obtained by The Washington Post, Vance lamented that Trump’s first term had “thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism.” It is likely, given Vance’s criticism of the GOP repeal effort, that this was a partial reference to that.

The current GOP bill’s cuts to Medicaid aim at populations similar to those targeted in the 2017 bill, Robin Rudowitz, a vice president at the health care nonprofit KFF, tells me. Rudowitz notes that both populations broadly include “low-income parents as well as adults without dependent children,” people who are “largely in low-wage jobs and don’t have access to private insurance,” many with “at least one chronic condition.” There are a lot of people like that in Trump country.