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The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has announced that it will not be possible to make the $1.5 trillion in funding cuts called for in the GOP’s current budget package without hollowing out Medicaid.

Medicaid saves lives. Recent studies show access to Medicaid is a matter of life or death for the more than 70 million Americans who receive it. In fact, studies also show that Medicaid saves more lives in Republican districts than it does in Democratic districts.

Yet the GOP is intent on making these cuts to give $4.5 trillion in tax cuts to billionaires and the ultra-rich. The math doesn’t add up, but the cost in human suffering certainly does.

The research is clear. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that Medicaid expansion saved the lives of 19,200 older Americans from 55-64 years old, over the four years from 2014-2017, compared to the death rates from the preceding six-year period.

In contrast, the same study shows 15,600 preventable deaths among states that did not expand Medicaid across the same four-year period. If Medicaid had been expanded in all 50 states, total lives that could have been saved among younger seniors not yet eligible for Medicare comes to nearly 35,000.

Moreover, the study shows this impact increased dramatically per capita each year people had better access, so that by the year 2017, if all states had expanded Medicaid, 13,300 premature deaths would be prevented per year.

Access to Medicaid leads to increases in people getting regular check-ups and needed surgeries, early-stage cancer diagnoses, and filling prescriptions for heart disease and diabetes. It also leads to decreases in mortality from late-stage kidney disease, incidence of depression, and people with no regular health care provider or primary care physician.

These drops in mortality were mostly due to improved treatment of chronic conditions that are known to be responsive to timely medical treatment, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Especially important is improved access to, and regular usage of, medications proven effective for these life-threatening conditions.

Despite these life-saving benefits, the House GOP’s budget directs the committee responsible for federal healthcare spending to find at least $880 billion in healthcare cuts over 10 years. Reducing costs that much is simply impossible without huge cuts to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid and, while all three programs are at risk, Medicaid is the most politically vulnerable to cuts.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is not being honest when he says they will find their cuts simply by targeting “fraud and abuse.” The figures the GOP is calling for will require real cuts in real benefits that save real people’s lives. They are seeking the biggest cuts in Medicaid in history, just to give away billions in taxes to their richest benefactors.

Click ‘START WRITING’ to sign and send a message to your members of Congress:
Medicaid saves the lives of families, children and the elderly. Do not cut Medicaid now or ever! >>>

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has announced that it will not be possible to make the $1.5 trillion in funding cuts called for in the GOP’s current budget package without hollowing out Medicaid.

Medicaid saves lives. Recent studies show access to Medicaid is a matter of life or death for the more than 70 million Americans who receive it. In fact, studies also show that Medicaid saves more lives in Republican districts than it does in Democratic districts.

Yet the GOP is intent on making these cuts to give $4.5 trillion in tax cuts to billionaires and the ultra-rich. The math doesn’t add up, but the cost in human suffering certainly does.

The research is clear. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that Medicaid expansion saved the lives of 19,200 older Americans from 55-64 years old, over the four years from 2014-2017, compared to the death rates from the preceding six-year period.

In contrast, the same study shows 15,600 preventable deaths among states that did not expand Medicaid across the same four-year period. If Medicaid had been expanded in all 50 states, total lives that could have been saved among younger seniors not yet eligible for Medicare comes to nearly 35,000.

Moreover, the study shows this impact increased dramatically per capita each year people had better access, so that by the year 2017, if all states had expanded Medicaid, 13,300 premature deaths would be prevented per year.

Access to Medicaid leads to increases in people getting regular check-ups and needed surgeries, early-stage cancer diagnoses, and filling prescriptions for heart disease and diabetes. It also leads to decreases in mortality from late-stage kidney disease, incidence of depression, and people with no regular health care provider or primary care physician.

These drops in mortality were mostly due to improved treatment of chronic conditions that are known to be responsive to timely medical treatment, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Especially important is improved access to, and regular usage of, medications proven effective for these life-threatening conditions.

Despite these life-saving benefits, the House GOP’s budget directs the committee responsible for federal healthcare spending to find at least $880 billion in healthcare cuts over 10 years. Reducing costs that much is simply impossible without huge cuts to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid and, while all three programs are at risk, Medicaid is the most politically vulnerable to cuts.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is not being honest when he says they will find their cuts simply by targeting “fraud and abuse.” The figures the GOP is calling for will require real cuts in real benefits that save real people’s lives. They are seeking the biggest cuts in Medicaid in history, just to give away billions in taxes to their richest benefactors.

Click ‘START WRITING’ to sign and send a message to your members of Congress:
Medicaid saves the lives of millions of families, children and the elderly. Do not cut Medicaid now or ever! >>>

Already Elon Musk’s SpaceX-Starlink has received at least $19.8 billion dollars from NASA and the Department of Defense to build up the U.S. space program. Musk now owns half of the nation’s functioning satellites.

In 2023, more than 1,900 of the over 2,100 objects launched by the U.S. were Starlink satellites. Ultimately Musk is aiming to have over 40,000 satellites in orbit. Starlink satellites play a crucial role in battlefield communications in Ukraine, giving private citizen Musk outsized influence over our ally’s military operations -- which he has not hesitated to use.

Now Musk wants to privatize NASA. Cutting out that pesky “middleman” and fully privatizing space exploration would give Musk unparalleled military and civilian power to gather and control the dissemination of information, while eliminating enforcement of regulations supporting safety, transparency, and fair practices.

Our country’s space program should not be driven by the whims of billionaires -- or worse, by their for-profit goals of resource extraction, satellite expansion and lunar manufacturing facilities. NASA is critical to maintaining a long-term space program that isn't the private property of a billionaire boys club.

Musk also wants to control NASA and its space program to eliminate competition. NASA currently promotes private competition by having corporations and the billionaires that own them bid for projects. That’s how Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has beat out SpaceX for contracts, receiving at least $11.5 billion dollars from NASA and the U.S. Space Force.

Let's be clear. The same billionaires obsessed with dominating the future of space exploration have made their fortunes in industries that have not only failed to address the global climate crisis, they often made the growing disaster much worse.

With the black soot these rockets inject directly to the Earth’s upper atmosphere causing warming at 500 times the rate of a commercial airliner and other atmosphere-wrecking pollutants -- include nitrogen oxides, aluminum oxide, hydrochloric acid, and chlorine -- depleting our fragile ozone layer as well, these same billionaires cannot be trusted to run a space program developing other planets without oversight and regulations to rein them in.

Don't let Elon Musk privatize America's space program. Sign and send your direct messages demanding Congress save NASA now