At a 24-hour vigil to protect Medicaid on the National Mall in Washington, DC, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) was to the point: to protect democracy, Medicaid has to be protected, too.
The vigil, which kicked off Wednesday at 1 p.m. ET, is hosted by the advocacy group Caring Across Generations and will be livestreamed until it ends Thursday; beyond Raskin, the event featured speakers including Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) alongside disability advocates and Medicaid users, in response to a series of White House attacks and cuts on health services spearheaded by President Donald Trump, his advisor Elon Musk, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
“Sometimes,” Raskin said, “people say to me, ‘Well, is it more important to go and fight for democracy and judicial independence and the right to vote, or is it more important to go and fight for Medicaid and Social Security?’ That’s a false choice. It’s all the same.” The United States, Raskin said, needs to represent everyone—not just people like Trump and Musk.
Since February, Republicans in Congress, at Trump’s prompting, have been pushing a federal budget that would entail up to $88 billion in annual cuts to Medicaid’s $600 billion budget, which supports some 72 million users. While President Trump has repeatedly promised not to cut Medicaid directly, the budget proposals before Congress won’t be possible without drastic cuts to the social safety net.
“What they’re doing with the budget is to destroy community,” Pelosi said. “Community has a word—unity—in it, and that is what we have to be: completely unified in our fight for Medicaid, for Medicare, for Social Security, for SNAP.”
“We will be out here as long as it takes!” Maria Town of @aapd-disability.bsky.social highlights that Medicaid allowed her to have physical therapy and her mom to have respite care.
— Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) (@autisticadvocacy.org) May 7, 2025 at 10:53 AM
For disabled people who rely on Medicaid, those cuts would almost certainly mean a reduction of services, including funding for home care workers—if it doesn’t lead to their being kicked off the service altogether. Raskin cited one Maryland constituent who had shared with him that Medicaid was what made it possible for him to live independently and work.
“This is a matter of life and death for millions of people across the country,” Raskin said. “So the question is, what kind of America are we going to be? Are we going to be in America for dictators and plutocrats and theocrats and autocrats, or are we going to be an America for all the people?”
The vigil, Raskin said, helped to demonstrate that Americans were “not going to allow” Donald Trump to sign a widely harmful budget into law.
“It is through American democracy that we’ve created Medicaid, that we’ve created Social Security, that we’ve created Medicare,” Raskin said. “We are not going to allow them to tear it down.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.