Before turning the post over to Pat, I would add here that the bill also contains provisions for defanging the judiciary in a petty attempt to further immunize Trump from consequences. MSNBC reports that republican house member Mike Flood admitted not even knowing about the provision during a testy townhall. They’re afraid to hold townhalls. My own representative Juan Ciscomani eeked out a victory here because of Green party votes diverting away from the democrat Kirsten Engel. It’s a moderate district, and Ciscomani promised on his website to protect Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. But he voted for the bill. One defection would have derailed it. Ciscomani won’t hold a townhall here. These folks ought form the Illiterate Caucus and farm out the heavy lifting to ChatGPT. OK, that’s a joke. What isn’t? An utterly mad ban on AI regulation by the states for 10 years. I’ll write a more expanded post on this later, but one can find great material with Gary Marcus, a technologist and thinker in this space.

Let’s get to Pat’s concerns, after which you can entertain yourself with San Fernando Red and his criminal misdeeds.

Which is more likely to kill a Texan: a violent immigrant or lack of access to healthcare?  I personally know at least three Texans who have died needlessly in recent years because they could not get medical care—I don’t know a single victim of an immigrant killer.  Yet we are in a state of near panic over immigrant crime while we complacently watch Congress gut our already limited healthcare system.  They spend untold billions to militarize our southern border (even though illegal crossings have been dropping for well over a year), while they recklessly fire the good people who keep our limited access to healthcare patched together as best they can. 

One sure way to stop immigration is to make America such a cruel nation that no one will want to come anyway.  Congress seems to be vigorously pursuing that goal with Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”  They claim to be cleaning out “graft, corruption, and fraud,” but Social Security is already one of the most efficiently administered systems in the world. Only about .5 cents on the dollar goes to administration and the rest to beneficiaries.  Just try to find another system that can match that record!  But cutting workers while increasing workloads is a sure way to destroy it. 

For example, the way the Republican Congress plans to “save” on Medicaid is by enacting work requirements for recipients, adding a whole new layer of bureaucracy to an already understaffed Social Security system.  I don’t disagree with encouraging work, but we must demand evidence that the goal actually is to save tax money, not just to impose burdens on recipients that obviously can’t be met without staff increases.  The game seems pretty clear: When needy people drop off the Medicaid roles because they can’t get the paperwork processed, more money will be available to cut taxes for rich political donors. 

Texans could tell the rest of the country how this is working out because we already have work requirements to qualify for Medicaid. An adult Texan who is not elderly, pregnant, or disabled doesn’t qualify. Of my three friends who died under the Texas system, one had breast cancer but had to wait until she was old enough for Medicare to get treatment—the delay took her life; another had skin cancer that had eaten off half of his face but was able to work until it had advanced too far for effective treatment; and the third had a neurological disorder that caused such excruciating pain without medical care that he took his own life.  I’m currently working with a friend who has disabling epilepsy that could be controlled if only he could get the medicines he needs—I’m praying that I don’t see another Texan perish because of our broken system.

The average wait-time to get a Social Security disability claim processed is already over 15 months, a long time to wait for treatment.  Staffing cuts and newly imposed requirements will surely extend that time and kill far more people than the total number of murder victims in the entire nation.

You may think this won’t affect you personally, but we all suffer when the culture we live in becomes cruel and focuses entirely on saving money and redistributing it to the already wealthy.  If you take your Christian faith seriously, please contact your senator and representative and stop this moral decline.  America, in making her fortune, is in danger of losing her soul!