Scoop: Democrats launch billboards outside hospitals to target Trump for ‘Gutting Rural Health Care’
FIRST ON FOX: The Democratic National Committee (DNC) on Tuesday launched billboards outside three rural hospitals that Democrats say are closing or cutting back services due to President Donald Trump’s recently signed domestic policy package.
The DNC says it placed billboards in Silex, Missouri; Stillwell, Oklahoma; and Missoula, Montana, to make sure that rural voters, who overwhelmingly supported Trump in last year’s presidential election, “know who is responsible for gutting rural health care.”
The Democrats’ national party committee, in taking aim at the sweeping and controversial tax cut and spending measure, named the “One Big Beautiful Bill” by Trump and congressional Republicans, argued that “residents are already seeing the firsthand effects of Trump’s Budget Betrayal.”
The billboards were shared first with Fox News Digital on Tuesday morning.
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The measure is stuffed full of Trump’s 2024 campaign trail promises and second-term priorities on tax cuts, immigration, defense, energy and the debt limit.
It includes extending the president’s signature 2017 tax cuts and eliminating taxes on tips and overtime pay.
By making his first-term tax rates permanent — they were set to expire later this year — the bill will cut taxes by nearly $4.4 trillion over the next decade, according to analysis by the Congressional Budget Office and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
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The measure also provides billions for border security and codifies the president’s controversial immigration crackdown.
The $3.4 trillion legislative package is also projected to surge the national debt by $4 trillion over the next decade, but many Republicans dispute the projection by the Congressional Budget Office.
And the new law also restructures Medicaid — the almost 60-year-old federal program that provides health coverage to roughly 71 million low-income Americans.
The changes to Medicaid, as well as cuts to food stamps, another one of the nation’s major safety net programs, were drafted in part as an offset to pay for extending Trump’s tax cuts. The measure includes a slew of new rules and regulations, including work requirements for many of those seeking Medicaid coverage.
Democrats, for months, have repeatedly blasted Republicans over the social safety net changes. And they spotlighted a slew of national polls last month and this month that indicate the bill’s popularity in negative territory.
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The DNC claims that the bill, which Trump signed into law on July 4 after the GOP-controlled House and Senate narrowly passed the measure along near-party-line votes, will gut Medicaid, forcing rural hospitals and nursing homes to close their doors.
“Rural hospitals were already on the brink of collapse thanks to Donald Trump, but now he has put the last nail in the coffin for rural hospitals with his billionaire budget bill,” DNC chair Ken Martin argued in a statement to Fox News.
Martin highlighted that “in states across the country, hospitals are either closing their doors or cutting critical services, and it’s Trump’s own voters who will suffer the most. This is what Donald Trump does — screw over the people who are counting on him.”
Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Michael Whatley, in an interview with Fox News Digital last week, spotlighted that “if you take a look at the Medicaid side of this conversation, the fact is that we’re going to be moving illegal aliens off of Medicaid. We’re going to be strengthening the program. Those are things that absolutely need to happen.”
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And he argued that “the tax cuts are going to be very, very strong indicators, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security. Plus we’re extending those Trump tax cuts. This is going to help every family in every community all across the country.”
Included in the megabill is a $60 billion fund, named the Rural Health Transformation Program, which Republicans say would offset cuts to Medicaid and would also help overcome long-standing health disparities that rural communities have faced.
But the DNC says their new analysis “shows this funding was never going to be enough to make a difference.”
And the DNC points to a non-partisan breakdown of the new law, which says that half of the rural hospital funding will be split evenly among all states that apply, regardless of need.
Both parties see the “big, beautiful bill” as a key part of their messaging heading into next year’s midterm elections, when the Republicans will be defending their slim majorities in the House and Senate.
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