To justify Medicaid cuts, the Trump administration says that "able-bodied young men" have become lazy because they can go to a doctor.
Medicaid is a US health insurance program for people with low incomes. It’s funded by states and the federal government, and like most government programs that help people in some way, it’s one of the Trump administration’s targets for cuts.
Why? It’s those dang videogames again, of course.
Part of the plan is to implement work requirements for Medicaid eligibility—this is currently only a feature of the program in Georgia—and to justify adding this administrative hurdle for patients and states, Republicans are claiming that access to taxpayer-funded healthcare is causing young men to waste all their time playing videogames instead of working.
“No one has talked about cutting one benefit in Medicaid to anyone who’s duly owed—what we’ve talked about is returning work requirements, so, for example, you don’t have able-bodied young men on a program that’s designed for single mothers and the elderly and disabled. They’re draining resources from people,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson last week.
“So if you clean that up and shore it up, you save a lot of money, and you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing videogames all day.”
In February, healthcare researcher KFF reported that the majority of people who use Medicaid do work. 64% of Medicaid recipients under the age of 65 work full or part-time, according to the organization’s analysis, and most of those who are not working have an illness or disability, are caregivers, or are in school. KFF does not believe that cuts to Medicaid will increase employment.
Mike Johnson on Medicaid: “What we’ve talked about is returning work requirements … you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day. We have a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicaid.” pic.twitter.com/2ZjaLrh2bgApril 10, 2025
The picture Johnson paints of Medicaid enrollees stealing from mothers and disabled people so they can sit around playing videogames may be an effective emotional appeal—the call to return “dignity” to American men is a nice touch—but it makes little sense on its face.
The US is an odd duck when it comes to providing healthcare services for its people, as some effort at socialized universal healthcare is available in dozens of countries around the world. US neighbors Canada, Mexico, and Cuba have it. The countries of Europe have it. Russia has it. And if being able to see a doctor while unemployed makes people lazy, then I’m not sure why US politicians spend so much time fretting over China’s growing economy, because it covers over 95% of its population.
At his confirmation hearing in January, it wasn’t clear that new US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr knew the difference between Medicaid and Medicare, two substantially different programs. He also suggested using AI to improve American healthcare.
Speaking of AI, new education secretary Linda McMahon seems to think that it’s “A1,” like the steak sauce, so things aren’t going much better over there.
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