Our leaders like to tell us that Utah is different. By which they mean better.
One of the things that makes us different — better — is that we do things together, for one another.
Our early state history is one of cooperation and mutual assistance. We have two giant nonprofit health care providers, several outstanding public universities, we are always building public libraries and most of us (though you might not know it from the behavior of our Legislature) support public education.
We even have, ahem, the nation’s leading nonprofit newspaper.
Yet all six members of Utah’s congressional delegation placed their loyalty to Donald Trump ahead of the interests of their constituents and voted for the president’s horribly misnamed “Big Beautiful Bill.”
That’s the measure that will take health care coverage and food assistance away from hundreds of thousands of people in Utah alone. That will siphon money not just from the most vulnerable, but from our state’s economy overall.
It will also take many millions of funding away from scientific and medical research, in Utah and elsewhere, projects that promised to improve the lives and health of all of us. And, despite some defensive efforts by Utah Sen. John Curtis, federal support for renewable energy projects — which have great promise for Utah’s environment and economy — will be slashed.
So much for community. So much for working together, and contributing money, for the benefit of all.
The only togetherness to be found in this bill is that it leaves all Americans holding the bag for an additional $3 trillion in national debt, red ink caused not by benefits for the poor or middle class but by huge tax breaks that toss the bulk of the savings to the top 1%. And, no, that income transfer to the top will not trickle down to the rest of us. It never has worked that way and it never will.
So, please, let us hear no more performative garbage about how Republicans, and this bill, do anything to promote “fiscal responsibility.”
The cuts in funding for Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act won’t just hurt people who will no longer be eligible for coverage. They will cost clinics and hospitals enough that many of them, especially in rural areas, will close and not be there to serve anyone.
Spite for Planned Parenthood — already prohibited from using federal funds for abortion services — will mean cuts to that organization’s clinics and the many other services they provide, including reproductive and general health, screening for diseases and birth control. The health of many young women will suffer, and children that might otherwise have been born healthy now won’t be.
We are told that the cuts will not hurt the most vulnerable among us — pregnant women, seniors, the disabled — but that narrow population is not what Medicaid is for. It is to provide the bare basics of health care that people in any civilized nation take for granted, to keep our workforce healthy.
We are told that the addition of work requirements for Medicaid and other benefits will push some mythical swarm of able-bodied men off of their grandmothers’ sofas, away from their video games and into work. But most Medicaid recipients already have jobs, and most of those who don’t are retired, disabled, in school or caring for children or disabled or aged relatives.
Meanwhile the bureaucracy and paperwork needed to police a work-based system will only hurt the vulnerable while, as experience in Arkansas and Georgia has already shown, doing little to boost workforce participation.
Some states may look to make up at least some of the difference after the federal cuts fully take hold, some of them not until after the 2026 midterm elections. Even if Utah wanted to be among them, it would be a steep fiscal climb.
What needs to happen now is for all of us to watch and see just how much human suffering is caused by the BBB. All the statistics and economic analysis won’t hit home as much as real stories of real people who can’t get the health care or other assistance they need, hospitals that close, promising businesses that won’t get off the ground.
There might be some hope that, once we see the damage done, Congress will reconsider. By that time, Trump may have lost interest and Utah’s Republican members of Congress will remember who they really work for.
At least we won a renewal of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.
There was one good thing hiding the 870-page catchall bill.
Thanks to the persistence of Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, the federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was finally renewed and expanded.
The two-year extension will provide some $7.7 billion in medical assistance and other aid for some of the millions of Americans who were sickened by radioactive wastes and by the fallout from nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s and 1960s.
Among those who stand to benefit are people who were then living anywhere in the state of Utah, as well as parts of other states lying downwind of nuclear tests, and people who worked in mining, refining or disposing of uranium during the Cold War nuclear program.
The RECA was shamefully allowed to expire last year, in part because Utah Sens. Mike Lee and John Curtis would not go to bat for their deserving constituents.
It is too bad that the only way such a necessary action could get through Congress, and win our delegation’s votes, was by hitching a ride on an otherwise deplorable conflagration of legislation.
But that’s just the way Congress works sometimes.
Editorials represent the opinions of The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board, which operates independently from the newsroom.
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