How many deaths are acceptable to pay for rich people’s tax breaks?
The House has passed a budget reconciliation bill, and now the Senate is taking up its version, which it hopes to pass before leaving for the July 4th recess. Health economists at the University of Pennsylvania have estimated that a bill like the House bill would lead to 51,000 preventable deaths each year. We have to ask Senators if they believe thousands of deaths is an acceptable price to offset some of the cost of the trillions in tax breaks in this bill.
As more of what the bill does becomes clear, the public opposes it by an almost two to one margin. The public overwhelmingly supports Medicaid and SNAP/food and nutrition assistance – three-quarters or even more oppose cuts in these basic needs programs. Despite this, the House and Senate Republican leadership are pushing hard for this bill. What they most want? Trillions of dollars in tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefit people with the highest incomes, and more funding to detain and remove immigrants, without due process and even when they are here legally.
That’s not what voters want. Please, right away, tell your Senators to defend SNAP and Medicaid, and to reject a bill that will lead to 51,000 preventable deaths a year.
51,000 |
More than 51,000 people will die each year because of the cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, and the lowered requirements for nursing home staffing in the House-passed Brutal Budget Bill.
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16 million |
That’s how many will lose health insurance if the House bill passes, according to the Congressional Budget Office. 10.9 million will lose Medicaid, Medicare, or Affordable Care Act (ACA) coverage because of cutbacks in the bill. Another 5.1 million will lose ACA insurance mostly because of the failure to extend the current expanded Premium Tax Credit.
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20.4% down to 11% |
From 2013 to 2023, the number of uninsured working age people declined from 20.4% to 11%, because of the ACA and its expansion of Medicaid. But with 16 million people expected to lose health insurance, those gains are likely to be reversed. You can find your state’s perhaps temporary reduction in the number of uninsured here.
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8 million;
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About 8 million people live in households that would lose some or all of their SNAP food assistance, including about 2.5 million children and over half a million adults who are aged 65 or older or have a disability, because someone in the household is subject to the newly expanded work reporting requirement. That’s roughly 1 in 5 SNAP participants. (See state data on the number of people at risk here.)
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120,000 – 250,000 |
CBO estimates between 120,000 – 250,000 immigrants here lawfully and now eligible for SNAP benefits would lose them if the Big Brutal Bill is enacted, including 50,000 children. These include people here for humanitarian reasons. See state data here.
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53% – 27% |
By an almost two to one margin, voters polled by Quinnepiac oppose the bill in Congress misnamed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBB).
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87%; 75% |
The public overwhelmingly supports Medicaid and food aid. 87% of voters polled think Medicaid funding should increase or stay the same. 75% say the U.S. is spending either too little or the right amount on nutrition assistance.
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$400 |
Expected annual increase in an average family’s household energy bill because of the budget bill’s elimination of federal tax credits for low-carbon sources of electricity like wind, solar, batteries and geothermal power.
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1%; 69%; 44% |
The poorest fifth of Americans would receive 1 percent of the bill’s net tax cuts in 2026 while the richest fifth would receive 69 percent and the richest 5 percent alone would get nearly half (44 percent) of the net tax cuts that year, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP).
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-$820;
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If the Big Brutal Budget Bill passes, taking into account the loss of services like Medicaid and SNAP plus the impact of the tax cuts: in 2026, the lowest 10th, with incomes up to $17,000/yr, would lose $820; while the richest one-tenth of 1%, with incomes above $4.3 million, would gain $390,070, according to the Penn-Wharton Budget Model.
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