{"id":44560,"date":"2026-08-04T15:31:07","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T20:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/?p=44560"},"modified":"2026-08-04T15:31:21","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T20:31:21","slug":"medicaid-cuts-enable-social-murder-disproportionately-targeting-the-disabled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/2026\/08\/medicaid-cuts-enable-social-murder-disproportionately-targeting-the-disabled\/","title":{"rendered":"Medicaid cuts enable social murder, disproportionately targeting the disabled"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Evan R.| Red Phoenix correspondent | Oregon\u2013<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Stacey Park Milbern, a lifelong disability rights activist and defender of Medicaid programs, in 2017. (Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As the rate of profit continues to decline, Capital turns its gaze inward, cannibalizing its own population in a monomaniacal drive to sustain returns. Those it can no longer extract surplus value from are the first to be discarded, which is why disabled people are now in the regime’s sights. The “One Big Beautiful Bill,” signed in July 2025, carries out the largest cut to Medicaid in the history of the program, disproportionately targeting the disabled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) puts the reduction in federal Medicaid spending at roughly $911 billion over ten years<\/a>. The Georgetown Center for Children and Families found that these health cuts will strip insurance from an additional 10 million people by 2034, and closer to 15 million once the expiring marketplace subsidies are counted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is class warfare, dressed in the language of fiscal responsibility. The same law that strips care from the sick and the disabled hands out tax cuts valued at around $4.5 trillion over the decade<\/a> for the capitalists. The dictatorship of capital takes money from disabled workers to\u00a0 give it, hand over fist, to the bourgeoisie . It is deliberate and class-conscious policy. It is class war prosecuted from above, and it will be answered only by class war organized from below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The single largest driver of the coverage terminations is the new work reporting mandate. Adults aged 19 through 64 must now prove, month after month, that they have spent at least 80 hours working, volunteering, or studying<\/a>. This one provision alone, CBO estimates, will make 5.3 million people uninsured by 2034, with another 700,000 lost to more frequent eligibility checks. Forty-one states are compelled to build this apparatus. Several already have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Mehmet Oz, a con artist so thoroughly discredited that even Democratic Party-aligned advocacy groups have taken to calling him a quack grifter<\/a>, now influences the health outcomes of 160 million Americans. He described the rule as a way to help people “build skills and independence through work.” The Department of Health and Human Services produced a study on cue, claiming the requirements could reduce poverty for as many as 2.9 million people<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How will they reduce poverty by cutting the insurance of poor people?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The trick is simple. Work more hours and you earn more money. No study is required to prove it, and the study proves nothing else. What it never asks is what that demand costs a person who is sick or disabled and cannot simply produce the hours on command. It assumes the unemployed find jobs and the unable become able, then declines to count what happens to the ones who can do neither.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Buried in the study’s own notes is the admission that its income figures do not account for the health care costs of losing coverage. The increased wages are counted. The deaths never enter the equation. When a sick worker loses coverage and falls out of the data, the state records a person lifted toward “self-sufficiency.” The corpse is filed under success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The perpetrators of such heartless strategies have already run this experiment and they know how it ends. Arkansas imposed Medicaid work requirements in 2018, and within seven months more than 18,000 people<\/a> were gone, one in four of everyone subject to the rule. Nearly all of them already worked or qualified for an exemption and simply could not fight their way through the paperwork. The employment rate did not budge, a finding that Harvard<\/a> and the Urban Institute<\/a> both confirmed. What people got instead was medical debt and care they could no longer afford.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Georgia ran a smaller version of this. Its work requirement enrolled a tiny fraction of those eligible, and through mid-2025 the program had spent $54 million on administration against $26 million on actual care<\/a>, more than twice as much policing eligibility as providing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Off the rolls is not a neutral place to stand. Coverage is the line between a treatable condition and a fatal one. A peer-reviewed analysis in the Annals of Internal Medicine projected that the Medicaid cuts alone will kill on the order of 16,600 people every year<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedrich Engels had a word for this nearly two centuries ago: social murder<\/a>, described by Engels as deaths that result from “when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, [\u2026] knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Congress was warned, in writing, with the body count attached. It passed the bill slashing benefits anyway, to finance tax cuts for the rich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The $911 billion was printed in the official tables. The body count was not. The state has done the math and found that some lives are not worth preserving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Defenders of the law insist that disabled people are protected, that anyone who is “medically frail” is exempt. The interim rule decided that a person with a physical, intellectual, or developmental disability counts as “medically frail” only if their condition “significantly impairs” the ability to perform an activity of daily living such as bathing or dressing. Anyone the state judges insufficiently broken is thrown back into the work-reporting machine. The definition is far narrower than the one used by the Americans with Disabilities Act. Workers can be disabled enough to face discrimination and poverty, yet not disabled enough, in the eyes of this state, to keep their health care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rule’s logic is a closed loop. To qualify as too sick to work, your illness must be severe enough to keep you from working, which means anyone with a job does not qualify. Hold the job and you forfeit the exemption. Lose the coverage and you lose the doctor who could prove you were sick. More than 40 percent of Medicaid adults between 40 and 64 live with serious health limitations, and most of them are not officially disabled. They are exactly the people this trap of a requirement in the law is built to catch. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cuts reach the caretakers themselves too, not only the people they care for. Medicaid pays some family members to look after disabled relatives full time, work that keeps a profoundly disabled person out of an institution and alive. A mother in Maryland<\/a> is paid through a state waiver to care for her nonverbal 28-year-old son, bathing him, feeding him, shaving his face, stripping the sheets when he wets the bed, etc.. Maryland, with both a Democratic legislature and a Democratic governor, is cutting roughly $18,000 a year out of her household. The twin jaws of the federal and state government are closing on her throat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The federal health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who spent decades peddling medical misinformation before being handed authority over the nation’s health, called programs that incentivize care providers fraud and accused relatives of being paid for tasks they used to perform for free. Underneath the contempt, there’s an admission. The labor of keeping a disabled member of the working class alive is not, to capital, a worthy goal. It produces no commodity and turns no profit, so it does not count as work, only as a cost to be cut. Capital wants that care done for free, the way it always was, by mothers and family members who did it unpaid and unseen, thus socializing the costs. Pay them a wage or a stipend and suddenly it is fraud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Capitalism measures workers\u2019worth by their capacity to produce surplus value. A worker who cannot be profitably exploited is not, to capital, a person but a liability, and disability is the name capital gives the bodies it can no longer fully use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Medicaid covers around 15 million disabled people, more than a third of all disabled people in the country, and disabled people already face poverty at more than twice the rate of everyone else<\/a>. The program pays for the home and community-based services that let disabled people live outside of institutions at all. When the state attacks Medicaid, it is attacking the thin material basis on which disabled people maintain any independence. The alternative is the institution, where capital warehouses the people it has discarded and charges for the privilege. The reserve army of labor has always included those whom the market deems unfit to work. Now the state is formalizing their exile and calling it independence. This is capital’s logic. A life that cannot generate a profit is not worth preserving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The working class should apply that logic in reverse. A system that sustains itself only by exploitation has forfeited any claim of legitimacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both parties built this. Work requirements for the poor have a long pedigree in American capitalist governance, dressed in the language of dignity and personal responsibility, signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996 and waved through by both wings of the ruling-class consensus on demonstrably false pretenses<\/a>. The current law is more brazen than its predecessors, but it is continuous with them. The function of the means test is to ration survival, to make the receipt of care so administratively painful that people give up. The state has even budgeted for it, allocating $200 million in “efficiency” grants and paying more than $600 million from private technology vendors to build the surveillance and verification systems that will police the poor. Capital profits twice. It profits from the tax cut, and it profits from the contract to build the machine that enforces the cut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Survival has been made a privilege, earned through usefulness to capital. That is a declaration of war.\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

What stops it is organized working-class power, and nothing gentler. Disabled people and their comrades have to be organized where they actually hold leverage, in the workplace, the union, the hospital, and the streets. Coverage defended by collective force. Mutual aid that keeps people alive while the fight is waged. Strikes and disruption that drive the cost of this policy back onto the people who authored it instead of leaving it to fall only on the people it targets. Mass refusal to let a single neighbor be purged in silence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every termination letter is a decision made in a boardroom and a legislature that certain lives are not worth their price, and the task now is to make this policy impossible to carry out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The demand is not a better exemption form, and it is not the restoration of a means-tested program that rationed care from the start. The demand is the expropriation of the entire apparatus of for-profit medicine, the insurers, the hospital chains, the pharmaceutical giants, and the provision of care on the basis of need and nothing else. That requires breaking the power of the class that owns them. No such victory has ever been handed down from above. It is taken.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the rate of profit continues to decline, Capital turns its gaze inward, cannibalizing its own population in a monomaniacal drive to sustain returns. Those it can no longer extract surplus value from are the first to be discarded, which is why disabled people are now in the regime’s sights. The “One Big Beautiful Bill,” signed in July 2025, carries out the largest cut to Medicaid in the history of the program, disproportionately targeting the disabled.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":44659,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[172,97],"tags":[401],"class_list":["post-44560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-healthcare","category-us-news","tag-disability"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/08-2026_medicaid.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44560"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44660,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44560\/revisions\/44660"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}