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Daily Mail
11-07-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
Opinion: Trump-backed town doomed by his healthcare policy
A tiny county that overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump has now been doomed by his flagship policy that threatens to wipe healthcare from millions. A staggering 85 percent of Knox County, Kentucky, backed the Republican president in the election in November, with just 14 percent wanting Kamala Harris sworn in. But just eight months later, they may be regretting it, as his Big Beautiful Bill, which passed on Independence Day, looks set to tear apart their everyday lives. The policy is set to strip $1 trillion from Medicaid, leaving an estimated 17 million Americans without insurance by 2027 and it could decimate healthcare systems in rural areas, like Knox. The county, which has a population of 30,000, has 38 percent of its total population on the system, including over 7,000 children. Locals are now feeling betrayed by the Commander-in-Chief, who promoted the bill as a 'win for workers, farmers, and America's future.' Dr. Osama Hashmi, a dermatologist in Atlanta, told the Daily Mail: 'People think of healthcare as a free-market system and it's really not. It affects everybody.' For Knox County resident Teresa McNab (pictured), whose husband fell ill and fatally started seizing on the floor of their home in 2021, Medicaid helped save their family. Now, she and her daughter's coverage is being threatened by Trump's prized bill, which requires workers to work at least 80 hours per month to qualify for it. For the line cook, who also cares for her mother, it's nearly impossible, she told The Telegraph. 'I take care of my daughter, I take care of my 78-year-old mom, I take care of our home, and half the time I don't even have time for myself,' she said. For Lisa Garrison (pictured), she would not have been able to afford her daughter's eye condition that would have cost her $180,000 without Medicaid. 'You will be left without hospitals that can serve you near the hollers, without affordable or state-provided healthcare and SNAP benefits will also be affected.' She added on her Facebook page earlier this month: 'This bill is atrocious and dangerous. This bill will cause people to die.' Hashmi agrees, adding to the Daily Mail that it will '100 percent lead to death.' Kentucky faces the highest number of rural hospital closures in the country due to the bill, which will cut $28million from the Bluegrass State's program in 10 years. Thirty-five hospitals in Kentucky are at risk, Democrat Governor Andy Beshear said, and 200,000 in the state could lose coverage. The Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform found that the Bluegrass State has 19 hospitals that already have 'losses on services', which will only get worse when hospitals have to eat the cost of Medicaid cuts for patients unable to pay. It also found that 16 are definitely at risk of closing, with four at the immediate risk level, a June 2025 report found. 'This bill risks 200,000 Kentuckians' lives, the jobs of 20,000 healthcare workers, 35 rural hospitals, and our economy,' the governor said in a statement. 'The passage of the 'big, ugly bill' marks a sad day for our country and commonwealth. 'Kentucky deserves better.' The Medicaid cuts don't go into effect until January 1, 2027, but Hashmi said recipients will feel the effects much sooner and possibly within the next 12 months. Hospitals and other healthcare providers in Atlanta, where he works, have already begun discussing whether or not they will continue to accept Medicaid as they 'decrease [their] reliance' on it ahead of the upcoming federal funding losses. 'That planning starts now,' Hashmi (pictured), who volunteers and works at a private practice, said. 'Patients will see the effects in 12 months.' Although those who lose their coverage will feel the effects the fastest, the federal cuts also hurt those using private insurance. As hospitals and doctors' offices close in rural areas, patients will be forced to go to urban areas and even metropolises to receive care, which ups wait times, decreases the quality of care as doctors have to see more patients, and threatens the infrastructure of healthcare. 'We already have an access problem in the US,' Hashmi said. More so: 'We all pay into this,' the dermatologist said. Without federal funding, the states will have to subsidize hospitals to keep them afloat or the facilities risk bankruptcy. This means the 50 states, especially those that heavily rely on Medicaid funding, will have to raise taxes for residents. 'State systems are going to be severely disrupted,' Hashmi said. The debt hospitals take on for low-income patients will also rise, not just because ill person cannot pay them, but they will now take longer to seek care. This means, when they do seek medical attention, they'll be in later stages of diseases and illnesses that will require more advanced care, especially for cancer patients, who might seek help after it's too late. Hashmi said he has many patients where he can cure their skin cancer by simply removing it if it's detected early, but for those who wait longer, it might not be so simple. He fears more Medicaid patients will wait until it's an emergency to seek help. 'I think they should be really worried,' he said of the cuts. Miller Morris, a women's health researcher, said: 'Medicaid isn't just a line item, it's a lifeline.' And the cuts affect organizations like Planned Parenthood , which provides STD testing, prenatal and postpartum services, and birth control to patients. 'Cutting these services means millions of low-income women, especially in rural areas, will lose access to basic, often life-saving care.' Leadership Consultant, Harold Reynolds (pictured), of Chicago, who works with clients in rural areas, called the bill a '$1 trillion mistake.' 'Whether the motive is fiscal conservatism or opposition to the [Affordable Care Act], the result of these cuts is not a more efficient system. It's a more fragile one,' he told Daily Mail. 'We're not just talking about trimming excess, we're pulling funding from hospitals and providers that serve everyone.' Many experts also told the Daily Mail that the miseducation surrounding Medicaid - which is also called Obamacare - very much could have played a role in the support and confusion surrounding this bill. Many people whose healthcare was threatened under the bill had no idea, as they didn't realize their services were Medicaid, which now risks the health and safety of children, adults, and the elderly. 'Supporters justify this by pointing to $56billion in 'improper payments' in 2023. But what they don't explain is that the vast majority of those payments are not fraud,' Reynolds said. 'According to federal data, only about 1-4 percent of those improper payments are suspected fraud. The rest are paperwork errors, billing mismatches, or technical violations. 'What's really being cut is the funding that pays for maternity wards, ambulance services, emergency rooms, and nursing home care. Medicaid isn't just a benefit for the poor. It's a revenue stream for hospitals, clinics, and long-term care facilities. 'Gutting it weakens the whole system,' Reynolds concluded. And if rural communities are impacted significantly more than urban areas and cities, it could become a legal problem for the Trump Administration, Attorney Ben Michael, of Michael & Associates, told Daily Mail. 'With eligibility requirements becoming stricter, and if rural areas are more negatively impacted as others, that may be grounds for legal action in regard to discrimination,' he said. But for now, Americans brace for the inevitable and pray for a more equitable solution.
Daily Mail
11-07-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
Small town became the MAGA heart of America. Now Trump's doomed them
A tiny county that overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump has now been doomed by his flagship policy that threatens to wipe healthcare from millions. A staggering 85 percent of Knox County, Kentucky, backed the Republican president in the election in November, with just 14 percent wanting sworn in.
Fox News
08-07-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
How the Supreme Court's injunction ruling advances Trump's birthright citizenship fight
President Donald Trump is aiming to terminate birthright citizenship in the United States – and the Supreme Court's recent decision to curb universal injunctions has brought him one step closer to accomplishing that mission. While changing the way the government gives citizenship to babies born in the United States is still an uphill climb, the high court's ruling raised the possibility that Trump's new policy to end automatic citizenship could, at least temporarily, take effect in some parts of the country. Lawyer Carrie Severino, president of the conservative legal advocacy group JCN, said it was unclear at this stage of litigation how Trump's policy would work logistically or to whom it would apply. The Supreme Court's decision, issued June 27, barred Trump's executive order from becoming active for 30 days. "Normally, if you give birth at the hospital, they just automatically issue everyone a Social Security number," Severino told Fox News Digital. "Now the question isn't open and shut like that." The Supreme Court's decision arose from various Democratic-led states and immigration rights groups bringing several lawsuits across the country challenging Trump's executive order, which the president signed shortly after he took office. The order dramatically changed the scope of birthright citizenship, which is outlined under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and allows babies born to noncitizens in the United States to automatically receive U.S. citizenship in most cases. Courts uniformly rejected Trump's policy and blocked it by issuing universal injunctions that applied to the whole country and not just certain pregnant noncitizens being represented in court. Seattle-based federal Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, chastised government attorneys during a February hearing over the matter. "It has become ever more apparent that to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals," the judge said. "The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain." Coughenour later said that if Trump wanted to change the "exceptional American grant of birthright citizenship," then the president would need to work with Congress to amend the Constitution, rather than attempt to redefine the amendment through an executive order. In the wake of the Supreme Court's order, courts and plaintiffs are moving quickly to adapt and, in some cases, find workarounds before the 30-day deadline arrives. Within hours of the high court's decision, plaintiffs who brought a birthright citizenship lawsuit in Maryland asked a judge to change the lawsuit to a class action proceeding that covers all babies who will be born after Trump's executive order takes effect. The request was one of what is quickly becoming a manifold of court requests that are testing the Supreme Court's injunction decision and potentially undercutting it. The Supreme Court's decision left intact the ability for judges, if they see fit, to use class action lawsuits or statewide lawsuits to hand down sweeping orders blocking Trump's policies from applying to wide swaths of people. "The bottom line is that the Trump administration has the right to carry this order out nationwide, except where a court has stayed it as to parties actually involved in a lawsuit challenging it," Severino said. American Immigration Council's Michelle Lapointe wrote online there was a "real possibility" that if the judges overseeing the current lawsuits do not find a way in the next few weeks to issue broad injunctions blocking birthright citizenship, then some states might see the policy take effect. "That raises the risk of babies born in certain parts of the United States… being fully stripped of their rights as U.S. citizens, perhaps even rendering them stateless," Lapointe wrote. "The human cost of such an action is unconscionable." Regardless of what happens in the coming weeks and months, the underlying merits of Trump's birthright citizenship policy are on track to end up at the Supreme Court. The justices were able to avoid touching the substance of Trump's argument by merely considering the constitutionality of universal injunctions during this last go-round, but the next time a birthright citizenship lawsuit comes before them, they are likely to have to weigh in on whether Trump's policy is constitutional. Severino said she believed the six Republican-appointed justices would rely heavily on "history and tradition" and "what the words were understood to mean in 1868 when the 14th Amendment was passed." "It's a challenging issue, in part because our immigration system looks so dramatically different now than it did at the time of the 14th Amendment, because the sort of immigration we're looking at was not really on their radar, nor was the type of entitlement state that we are living in," Severino said. Michael Moreland, Villanova University law school professor, told Fox News Digital there has long been an academic debate about the language in the amendment. It states that babies born in the United States and "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" are citizens. The dispute, Moreland said, has centered on "how broadly or narrowly" to interpret that clause. The Trump administration has said that as part of its immigration crackdown, it wants to curtail abuse of the 14th Amendment, which can include foreigners traveling to the United States strictly to give birth with no intention of legally settling in the country. The amendment also incentivizes migrants to enter the country illegally to give birth and rewards pregnant women already living illegally in the country by imparting citizenship to their children, the administration has said. Judges, thus far, have found that Trump's policy is at odds with more than 150 years of precedent. The government has long given citizenship to any child born in the United States with few exceptions, such as babies born to foreign diplomats or foreign military members. "The balance of opinion for a long time has been on the side of saying that the 14th Amendment does have a right of birthright citizenship," Moreland said.
New York Times
07-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Now You See Josh Hawley, Now You Don't
Senator Josh Hawley sure knows how to scurry away. The Missouri Republican showed as much on Jan. 6, 2021, when he gave that infamous clenched-fist salute to the unruly mob bound for the Capitol — go get 'em, tigers! — then sprinted like terrified prey through the halls of Congress to evade them. He later wrote and plugged a book titled 'Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.' It extolled virility, valor, grit. All the qualities that he embodied on that heroic day. And which he just modeled anew in voting for President Trump's monstrously big but not even marginally beautiful domestic policy bill. For months before Hawley fell meekly in line last week, he sought and got enormous attention for being a holdout, a maverick, someone willing to tell the president uncomfortable truths and determined to prove that the MAGA movement really was looking out for the little people. His fist was once again clenched, his arm once again raised, this time in defense of the health insurance on which so many less privileged Americans depend. 'We must ignore calls to cut Medicaid and start delivering on America's promise for America's working people,' he wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion in May. It was 'must,' not should. It was declarative, not ruminative. He explained that 'slashing health insurance for the working poor' would be 'both morally wrong and politically suicidal.' He sounded like a warrior — and a masculine one, at that! — manning the barricades. Which, inevitably, he abandoned. The arc of Republican lawmakers in the Trump era bends toward complete submission. That's the posture in which Hawley and other Senate Republicans granted the president his financially reckless and needlessly cruel agenda. Back in November, I observed that the second Trump administration would test the Senate even more than the first one had, revealing 'how shamefully far from its onetime description as 'the world's greatest deliberative body' it has strayed.' The verdict is in. Having rubber-stamped many ridiculous senior administration officials, Senate Republicans have now signed off on a sprawling policy package that will, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, add more than $3 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade, even as it cuts over $1 trillion from Medicaid and results in nearly 12 million Americans losing their health insurance. The legislation makes a mockery of the party's longtime claims of prudent fiscal stewardship. And as Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, explained in a Senate speech, it 'will betray the very promise' that Trump made not to go after people's Medicaid. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
BBC News
04-07-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Trump to sign his huge tax and spending bill into law
US President Donald Trump is to sign his landmark policy bill into law, a day after it was narrowly passed by signing event at the White House on Friday afternoon, coinciding with 4 July celebrations, enacts key parts of the Trump agenda including tax cuts, spending boosts for defence and the immigration began his victory lap at an Iowa rally on Thursday night, telling supporters it will unleash economic growth, but he must now convince sceptical Americans as polling suggests many members of his own Republican party were opposed because of the impact on rising US debt and Democrats warned the bill would reward the wealthy and punish the poor. The 870-page package includes:extending 2017 tax cuts of Trump's first termsteep cuts to Medicaid spending, the state-provided healthcare scheme for those on low incomes and the disablednew tax breaks on tipped income, overtime and Social Securitya budget increase of $150bn for defencea reduction in Biden-era clean energy tax credits$100bn to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)The bill signing will precede 4 July American Independence Day fireworks and a military picnic attended by the pilots who recently flew into Iran to try to dismantle three nuclear celebratory mood follows days of tense negotiations with Republican rebels in Congress and days of cajoling on Capitol Hill, sometimes by the president Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries delayed the final vote in the lower chamber of Congress on Thursday by speaking for nearly nine called the bill an "extraordinary assault on the healthcare of the American people" and quoted testimony from individuals anxious about its his marathon speech only postponed the inevitable. As soon as he sat down, the House moved to a vote. Only two Republicans went against, joining all 212 Democrats united in opposition. The bill passed by 218 votes to this week, the Senate passed the bill but US Vice-President JD Vance was required to cast a tiebreaking vote after three Republicans held win now but political peril awaitsFact-checking three key claims about the billHours after the House passed the bill, the president was in a triumphant mood as he took to the stage in Iowa to kick off a years long celebration of 250 years since American independence."There could be no better birthday present for America than the phenomenal victory we achieved just hours ago," he told supporters in Des Moines."Very simply the One Big, Beautiful Bill will deliver the strongest border on Earth, the strongest economy on Earth [and] the strongest military on Earth."The White House believes the various tax cuts will help stimulate economic growth, but many experts fear that will not be sufficient to prevent the budget deficit - the difference between spending and tax revenue in any year - from ballooning, adding to the national by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) suggests the tax cuts could produce a surplus in the first year but will then cause the deficit to rise sharply. According to the Tax Policy Center, the tax changes in the bill would benefit wealthier Americans more than those on lower incomes, About 60% of the benefits would go to those making above $217,000 (£158,000), its analysis BBC spoke to Americans who may see a cut in the subsidies that help them pay for groceries. Jordan, a father of two, is one of 42 million Americans who benefits from the SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) scheme targeted by the brace for Trump's welfare cutsWhat is in the bill?He and his wife get about $700 a month to feed their family of four and the 26-year-old said if this bill reduces what he can claim he would get a second job. "I'm going to make sure that I can do whatever I can to feed my family," he says. Along with cuts to SNAP, the changes to Medicaid - a programme that covers healthcare for low-income, elderly and disabled Americans - would result in nearly 12 million losing coverage in the next decade, the CBO defend their changes to Medicaid, saying that by toughening up work requirements they are tackling abuse and taken before the bill passed in Congress suggests public support is low and dwarfed by numbers opposed. A recent Quinnipiac University survey pointed to only 29% endorsing the legislation, which rose to two-thirds among knowledge of the bill may be low too. Reuters reported there was little awareness of the legislation among Trump supporters they spoke to at the Iowa rally on Thursday night.
