During a closed-door meeting of Republican senators on Tuesday, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) tried to tamper down fears of voter blowback against the proposed cuts to Medicaid spending in the GOP’s budget reconciliation bill, claiming that voters will ultimately “get over it.”
The former Republican Senate leader’s comments came after Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), one of the most vulnerable Senate GOP incumbents in the 2026 midterm elections, expressed concern that the cuts included in the bill could lead to major electoral losses for the party, Punchbowl News reported.
McConnell responded by saying “failure isn’t an option” when it comes to the reconciliation package.
“I know a lot of us are hearing from people back home about Medicaid. But they’ll get over it,” he added.
After McConnell’s comments faced widespread pushback, a spokesperson for the senator claimed McConnell was referring to “people who are abusing Medicaid” and “the need to withstand Democrats’ scare tactics.”
But several examinations of the legislation have found that the bill’s proposed cuts would be detrimental, resulting in tens of thousands of excess deaths annually for people who would lose health coverage.
“Mitch McConnell told Senate Republicans that Americans concerned about losing Medicaid will ‘get over it.’ No one will ‘get over’ losing a loved one because Republicans in Congress failed them,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) said in response to McConnell’s comments.
“Mitch McConnell just told 1.4 MILLION Kentuckians on Medicaid to ‘get over it’ when they lose their health care. The @KYGOP does not care about the lives of the people in our Commonwealth,” a post on X from the Kentucky Democratic Party read.
Several polls demonstrate that GOP lawmakers’ concern about the public’s reaction to Medicaid cuts are warranted.
While the Republicans’ push for stricter “work requirements” to obtain Medicaid is popular, garnering 65 percent support from voters in a recent KFF poll, support for that standard drops to just 35 percent when people are informed that the vast majority of Medicaid recipients already work, and that many individuals and families would be at risk of losing coverage due to new burdensome rules that are included in the reconciliation package.
An Associated Press/NORC poll published this month also found that a majority of voters actually want funding for Medicaid to be increased. Per that survey, 50 percent of Americans believe Medicaid is funded too little, while 31 percent say it’s funded the right amount and just 18 percent say the program receives too much funding. Even among GOP voters, only 33 percent believe Medicaid spending is currently too high.
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