Key GOP senator warns Medicaid cuts could spell political disaster for Republicans
Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.), one of the most vulnerable Senate Republican incumbents facing re-election in 2026, warned Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) bluntly in a private meeting Tuesday that deep cuts to Medicaid could cost Republicans control of the House and Senate, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
Tillis, who has kept relatively quiet about the hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicaid cuts proposed by the Senate Finance Committee, blasted his leadership’s plan to forge ahead during a Republican luncheon on Capitol Hill.
“Thom Tillis got up and he had a chart on what the Senate’s provider tax structure will cost different states, including his. His will lose almost $40 billion. He walked through that and said ‘this will be devastating to my state,’” said a person familiar with Tillis’s blunt exchange with Thune behind closed doors.
The proposal to cap the health care provider tax rate is a major cost cutter in President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” but it is also among the most controversial provisions. Several key GOP senators have expressed alarm about the Medicaid cuts in the Senate’s version of the legislation.
Tillis’s chart, which he also showed to colleagues, showed that North Carolina would lose $38.9 billion in federal funding and that more than 600,000 North Carolinians would be at risk for losing Medicaid coverage.
“Tillis said this is going to be like ObamaCare. He said just like ObamaCare led to huge losses for Democrats in 2010 and 2012, he said this could be the same thing for us because hundreds of thousands of people in his state, millions around the nation are going to be kicked off of Medicaid — working people, who are Trump voters,” the source told The........
© The Hill
