DES MOINES - Iowa Republicans Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Ashley Hinson, Zach Nunn and Randy Feenstra voted for a big, bad budget-busting bill that will drive up grocery and healthcare prices for regular Iowans and will add $3.8 trillion to the national debt as interest rates hit 20-year highs.

The bill risks health care coverage for 281,000 Iowans and guts the SNAP programs that that nearly 260,000 Iowans depend on – all so they can pay for tax breaks for the richest Americans who also happen to be their biggest donors.

Among Medicaid enrollees in Iowa,

• 2 in 5 (40 percent) are children
• 2 in 5 live in rural areas
• 1 in 7 have three or more chronic conditions.

Medicaid covers nearly 40 percent of all births in Iowa, and 50 percent of people who live in nursing homes are enrolled in Medicaid. Seventy-seven percent of adult Medicaid recipients in Iowa are working. Medicaid cuts also put rural hospitals at risk of closing.

The Gazette has already issued a warning that mental health units in Iowa hospitals are barely staying afloat, and the Medicaid cuts Iowa Republicans just voted for could completely sink them. In Spencer, for example, 40 percent of the hospital’s psychiatric inpatients are covered by Medicaid. Iowa, which has a population of more than 3.2 million, is already in short supply of mental health beds with only about 760 available across the state.

In Iowa, more than:

• 64 percent of SNAP participants are families with children
• 35 percent are families with members who are older adults or are disabled
• 50 percent are in working families.

This bill also gives the top 0.1 percent of Americans an estimated average of $389,000 in yearly income after taxes. The CBO also predicts that under this bill the poorest tenth of U.S. households will see their income shrink by 2 percent in 2027, while the wealthiest tenth of U.S. households will see their income increase by 4 percent in 2027.

“Iowans are already paying too much for groceries and health care, but Iowa Republicans just voted to put more pressure on working families so they can fund tax breaks for the well-off and well-connected,” said Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart. “Medicaid cuts will impact everyone as we will start to see longer wait times in emergency rooms, longer drives to see our healthcare providers and fewer options for things like mental health care and OBGYN services — areas in which we are already lacking. Iowans won’t forget that their Republican representatives just prioritized millionaires and billionaires over working families.”