GOP defends Medicaid cuts in Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ with weird talking points about basement dwellers

President Trump’s tax and spending bill just passed in the House and is now on its way to his desk to become law. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the legislation (aka the “Big Beautiful Bill”) will cause 11.8 million Americans to lose their health insurance by 2034, thanks to $1.1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare.

Which Americans will lose access to these entitlement programs? When it comes to Medicaid at least, several GOP politicians have offered a suspiciously similar answer: It will be adults between the ages of 29-35 who choose to live in their mother’s basement to avoid working.

As Trump’s stated July 4 weekend deadline approached, Republican senators and congresspeople have talked in interviews and on the House floor about why proposed Medicaid cuts are meant to target this extremely specific subset.

The idea of making cuts to Medicaid has historically been unpopular, with a recent poll finding that even 54% of Trump voters are opposed to it. This unpopularity is why Trump has falsely claimed, again and again, that his tax bill would not touch Medicaid.

In order to make those cuts palatable, the politicians in favor of them needed a bogeyman. They needed the modern-day equivalent of the 1980s mythic creature The Welfare Queen, who, pundits at the time contended, strategically gave birth to more children in order to enjoy free handouts from the government.

Now we have a new version of the old stereotype: the 29- to 35-year-old loser who lives in his mom’s basement—often while playing video games.

The more GOP politicians have gone on about this supposed drain on society (House Majority Leader Steve Scalise alone has mentioned it at least three times in the past six weeks), the more rank-and-file social media users have seemed to absorb it.

A stereotype that doesn’t pass the smell test

But how many such basement-dwellers could actually be out there, enjoying the taxpayers’ largesse without contributing anything to society?

According to the People’s Policy Project, in December 2022, only four million Able Bodied Adults Without Dependents (ABAWD) were persistently enrolled in Medicaid and working fewer than 80 hours a month.

Of those four million, it’s anyone’s guess how many were simply choosing to play video games all day, as Scalise and his cohort suggest, rather than struggling to find work in a harsh job climate; finding it, but not being able to work the full 80 hours a month; dealing with mental health problems that still leave them technically able-bodied; taking care of other family members; or matriculating at a university. 

A generous estimate might be that one in four within the ABAWD cohort fit the stereotype, which would mean that approximately one million of the more than 70 million people currently on Medicaid fall within the narrow parameters of fraud, waste, and abuse that these politicians claim to be targeting exclusively.

Considering that over 11 million people are set to lose their health insurance now that this bill has passed, it seems extremely unlikely that Medicaid cuts will only affect basement-dwellers. Ironically, though, they might actually cause a lot of people to move into their mom’s basement.