August 08, 2025 10:25 AM UTC

Gabe Evans' Medicaid Dishonesty Gets Downright Desperate

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• by: Colorado Pols

Rolling Stone reports today on a new resolution introduced in the U.S. House by a trio of vulnerable Republicans including America’s Most Vulnerable Incumbent™ Rep. Gabe Evans that takes the denial and doublespeak following the passage of the historically unpopular “We’re All Going To Die Act” Republican budget bill to a credulity breaking point:

Last month, Republicans passed a reconciliation bill that is expected to kick millions of Americans off of Medicaid and other forms of health insurance. The legislation includes over $800 million in cuts to Medicaid spending over the next 10 years, the largest in the program’s history. Now, as Republicans gear up for next year’s midterm elections, vulnerable lawmakers who supported the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” are attempting to recast themselves as protectors of the health care program they sent to the wood chipper.

Last week, Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), Tom Kean Jr. (R-N.J.), and Gabe Evans (R-Colo.) introduced a resolution purporting to recognize the 60th anniversary of Medicaid’s establishment as well as “Congress’s commitment to preserve and strengthen the program for the nation’s most vulnerable populations.”

All three of them voted to kick people off of the program in order to pay for President Donald Trump’s tax boons to billionaires and big business — which is already paying dividends for corporate America…

Evans’ response to the obvious question of how he can celebrate a program he voted to kick tens of thousands of his own constituents out of is to once again falsely differentiate between those who Evans thinks “deserve” health coverage and the “others” who do not–a distinction that as we’ve covered at length and health care providers in Evans’ district warned will evaporate next year as CO-08 residents begin to confront the new bureaucratic hurdles intended to knock them or someone they know off the coverage rolls. Although the budget bill cynically put off the worst of the Medicaid changes from taking effect until literally a month after the 2026 midterms, millions of affected Americans will know by then what’s coming.

We’ve thought about using pics of the “Jedi Mind Trick” as a visual metaphor for what Evans is doing, but the problem with that is the Jedi Mind Trick worked at least part of the time. The polls say clearly that Republican claims it was necessary to slash Medicaid in order to “save it,” which in practice meant giving tax cuts for people who don’t need Medicaid, are not finding a receptive audience among voters.

“Jedi Mind Trick” gives Gabe Evans too much credit. This is a much cheaper trick, and an insult to voters’ intelligence.