As we've been discussing here over and over again, Republicans can't defend what's in Trump's "Big Beautiful" turd of a bill, so they've got to keep running to Fox, other right wing outlets, or anyone who will stick a microphone in their face to lie over and over again about what's actually in it.

On this Monday's The Will Cain Show on Fox, guest host Lawrence Jones spoke to Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall about Sen. Thom Tillis, who denounced the bill in a fiery speech on the Senate floor this Sunday, and after playing a portion of the criticism from Tillis, Jones told Marshall that he wasn't asking Marshall to attack his colleague, before basically asking him to do exactly that.

Marshall proceeded to lie that their bill is going to "strengthen Medicaid" instead of decimating it by kicking millions of vulnerable millions off of the program who rely on it, before lying about the fact that their draconian work requirement paperwork nightmare will end up kicking off people who are working, before basically calling anyone who does get kicked off lazy.

MARSHALL: This bill is gonna strengthen Medicaid. We're gonna strengthen it for those who need it the most. We protect it for seniors in nursing homes, people on disabilities, pregnant women, those types of folks so we protect it for them.

And then for rural America we're gonna have a special stabilization fund as well.

There's gonna be work requirements, so as long as you're willing to work 20 hours a week and by the way, there's people back home harvesting wheat today that are working 20 hours a day.

So if you lose Medicaid, it's on you, but we want to help people get jobs. I think this will strengthen Medicaid.

I think overall this is a step back in the right direction to make America healthy again.

It's not going to "make America healthy again." It's reversing the progress made by the ACA and making Americans dead again from lack of health care coverage.

Jones then asked Marshall about Sen. Markwayne Mullin's comments that it would be okay to dump 35 million people off of the program, and commented that somehow the "it seems like there's a lot of people that are on the program, that shouldn't be on the program" and that "Many would say that the math just isn't adding up."

Jones agreed with Mullin's remarks that "We don't pay people in this country to be lazy," saying that he thought Mullin "had a point," before insinuating that having half of the people on the program above the poverty line somehow means that there's a lot of "waste" they should be able to cut.

Marshall responded by saying that "there are 7 million healthy American men out there working age that are not working," and that he'd "love to help them find a job," and lying that half of those people are receiving Medicaid because of some sort of "fraud or abuse of the system."

The talk about the 7 million men out of the work force has been reported for years, going back to CBS reporting on it in 2023, and CNBC reporting on it in 2024, and with the reasons being anything from the fact that a lot of these men are not actually "healthy," to gaps with skills and education, to low pay for those without a college education, to incarceration records preventing many from finding employment, to the loss of jobs during the pandemic without enough trained workers to replace those that left the workforce.

And many gig or part-time workers may not have the proof needed for the requirements in the bill to prove they're working, or may find the paperwork too onerous or hard to navigate, which is a feature and not a bug with Republicans

The Milbank Quarterly had a good explainer on the work requirements and Marshall's lie here: Who’s Affected by Medicaid Work Requirements? It’s Not Who You Think:

Since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion passed in 2010, Medicaid work requirement proponents have sought to convince policymakers that the Medicaid working-age adult population is dominated by young, “able-bodied” adults who simply don’t work. This assertion is contrary to a mountain of evidence showing that the vast majority of working-age adults (aged 18-64) insured through Medicaid are either working, caring for family members, or exempt because of health issues.

Nonetheless, these baseless claims persist. Using what the authors cite as “responsive records” supplied by 23 states, a new report from the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) argues that “most Medicaid beneficiaries do not work at all.” Legally, a “responsive record” is a term of art under the Freedom of Information Act meaning a “record provided by a government in response to an information request.” FGA provides no information regarding what kind of records they examined, how they were analyzed, or any other indication of their reliability or accuracy or even their relevance to the question of the work status of Medicaid beneficiaries.

The FGA study also fails to offer any insight into the real question: Who exactly are these “able-bodied” Medicaid-enrolled working-age adults who do not work, how many of these adults actually exist, and what are their characteristics?

This information is essential if the goal is a policy that promotes work and community engagement without punitive measures that fail to account for who the population is and wrongfully deprive people of access to health care. Overwhelming evidence shows what can happen under broad mandates that tie health care to compliance with work reporting: Affected people, including workers and potentially exempted people are unable to navigate the reporting maze, lose their health care, uninsurance rates rise, and employment rates don’t change.

Creating an Accurate Portrait of Nonworking “Able-Bodied” Adults

To provide more detail regarding the question of who exactly are working-age, but nonworking, “able-bodied” Medicaid adults, we analyzed data from the 2023 American Community Survey (ACS), the Census Bureau’s gold standard annual population survey and the premier source of highly detailed information about Americans. The survey contains information collected from over 3.5 million households regarding multiple aspects of life, including income, health and health care, family and living arrangements, and work status.

Our focus was working-age adults who live in the community and who are enrolled in Medicaid. Within this population, we undertook three basic comparisons: (a) Medicaid enrollees versus their counterparts who are not enrolled in Medicaid; (b) Medicaid enrollees who work versus those who do not work; and (c) nonworking “able-bodied” Medicaid enrollees versus able-bodied enrollees who do, in fact, work. For the purpose of this analysis, we focused especially on the able-bodied question. We define the term “able-bodied” individuals as people who report no health issues, do not receive either Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) because of disability, do not have dependents under 18, and are not currently attending school. These attributes basically describe the population of interest among Medicaid work mandate proponents.

Go read the rest of their report on the breakdown with the numbers.

It's astounding to me that they've basically decided to turn men, a good deal of them who are young and white, into their latest version of St. Ronnie's welfare queens.

Good luck with the midterms once you've tossed a whole bunch of your base off of their health care coverage.