You Know it’s Bad When Texas Can’t Take the Trump-Musk Cuts Either!
Austin neurological nurse Monica Gonzalez calls Medicaid “fundamental to the survival of 72 million Americans.” Photos/Judith Sokoloff
By Steve Wishnia
AUSTIN, Tex.—Carrying signs that read “Some Cuts Never Heal,” about two dozen nurses and supporters marched up to Sen. John Cornyn’s office in downtown Austin March 20, protesting the Trump-Musk administration’s proposed massive cuts to Medicaid.
Security guards blocked the door to the building when the group arrived bearing a mock check for $57.3 billion from “working people” to “the billionaire class.” The $57.3 billion figure represents the amount of health-care funding for Texas—for Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)—that could be diverted to fund tax breaks for the wealthy if the Republican budget is passed, according to National Nurses United and the Texas AFL-CIO.
“Medicaid is fundamental to the survival of 72 million Americans,” Monica Gonzalez, a neurological nurse at Ascension Seton Medical Center, told the rally. “But this administration is cruel.”
Some Cuts Don’t Heal: Heidi Sloan of Austin DSA [bullhorn] denounces the loss of $57.3 billion in federal funding.
The House budget resolution passed without any Democratic votes in February called for $880 billion in cuts over the next ten years from non-Medicare spending administered by the Energy and Commerce Committee. About 93% of that is on Medicaid, and 2% on CHIP. While Sen. Cornyn has cosponsored bipartisan bills intended to reduce prescription-drug prices, he suggested to Politico last November that Medicaid funding should be converted to block grants to states, meaning that they would only be able to pay for a finite amount of care. He also supports work requirements for Medicaid recipients, accusing Democrats in February of expanding a program “intended to serve the needy” to one serving “working-age, able-bodied” people.
According to a Kaiser Family Foundation study updated in February, 64% of the 26.1 million people aged 19 to 64 who were receiving Medicaid but not disability benefits in 2023 were already working, and another 7% were enrolled in school. Of the others, more than three-fourths were not working due to caregiving, illness or disability, or inability to find work.
Cuts ‘really repulsive’
It’s “really repulsive” that this administration of billionaires is “trying to take away basic human needs from the American people,” Taylor, another Ascension Seton nurse, told Work-Bites.
Even at current funding levels, patients regularly go without medication because they can’t afford it, Gonzalez told Work-Bites. If people with atrial fibrillation, an irregular and often rapid heartbeat, don’t take blood thinners, they’re more likely to have a stroke. If diabetics ration their insulin, they’re more likely to get diabetic ketoacidosis, a potentially fatal condition in which their “blood sugar skyrockets,” causing ketones, organic acids produced when the body burns fat instead of glucose to create energy, to build up to toxic levels.
When HIV patients delay taking their medications, “then they come to us in really bad condition, struggling to breathe,” Taylor says. Sometimes they need to have tubes inserted into their chest to reinflate collapsed lungs, she added.
“Without the medication, I will die,” said Carolyn Williams of Texas VOCAL, telling the group that she has lived with the HIV virus for more than 25 years. Without Medicaid, she added, she couldn’t afford to pay for her medications, whose list price is thousands of dollars.
“I am an American, and we can’t take this anymore,” she said.
More than 40% of pregnant women in Texas get medical care through Medicaid, Helen, a labor and delivery nurse for 11 years, told the rally. The program also pays for care for the 370,000 children in foster care in Texas, Patsy Buida, a social worker for 48 years, told Work-Bites.
Protesters rally outside the office of Sen. John Cornyn in downtown Austin on March 20.
Ascension Seton is a nonprofit “safety net” hospital, which is generally defined as providing care regardless of patients’ ability to pay, such as if they’re uninsured or on Medicaid. Some of its patients come from as far as Arizona and Colorado, Taylor says.
The Trump administration is giving the nation a dose of the toxic medical policies the Texas state government has been dispensing for decades, state AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Leonard Aguilar says. He calls it “a fight against working people.”
The Republicans, who have governed Texas for 20 years, “keep talking about how bad the state is, but they’re the ones who run it,” Aguilar told Work-Bites. They wouldn’t even take the federal funds offered by Obamacare to expand Medicaid coverage to slightly higher income levels, he added.
Texas has about 3.8 million Medicaid recipients. According to federal Census Bureau survey figures from 2023, 21.7% of residents aged 19 to 64 had no health insurance, the worst proportion in the nation—almost double the national average of 11% and significantly worse than nearby states such as Arkansas and Oklahoma. The rate of uninsured children was 11.9%, more than twice the national average.
If the federal government slashes Medicaid, the burden of paying for care will fall on state and local governments—and that will have disastrous side effects on the medical system, says Gonzalez. Without reimbursements for treating Medicaid patients, hospitals and nursing homes will be more likely to lay off or not hire staff, so her workload could increase from an already high average of six patients to seven or eight.
The system is like “a spider web,” Gonzalez explains. “If you mess with a bit of it, the whole web shakes. They’re trying to rip away half of it.”