The following is an op-ed published in The Post-Bulletin on September 4, 2025:

Earlier this summer, Rep. Brad Finstad voted to take $1 trillion away from Medicaid and give $1 trillion in tax breaks to the richest 1% of Americans. This was very unpopular. A Fox News poll found that 59% of Americans oppose the bill, and Minnesotans have been speaking up about how the bill will make their healthcare even more expensive and harder to access.

Perhaps that’s why Finstad felt the need to write an op-ed defending his unpopular vote. In it, Finstad dismisses concerns about Medicaid cuts as “fearmongering” and even claims he voted to strengthen Medicaid — the program known as Medical Assistance here in Minnesota.

I grew up as a poor kid in Stewartville relying on Medicaid to see a doctor, and for 20 years I’ve taught students who’ve depended on it too. If one of my students turned in an essay with arguments as flimsy as Finstad’s, I’d have to give it a failing grade.

For example, take his claim that rural hospitals won’t be “roadkill” under this bill. He touts a new Rural Health Transformation Program that promises $50 billion for rural hospitals, but what he leaves out is that the bill slashes rural Medicaid spending by $137 billion . Our rural hospitals are already in crisis, with the Mayo Clinic in Fairmont having recently shut down surgery and labor services, and these new cuts put the entire hospital at risk of closing. That closure wouldn’t just hurt Medicaid recipients; it would make health care harder to access for everyone in the Fairmont area.

Finstad also argues that the bill’s new work requirements for Medicaid are similar to those Democrats supported in the 1990s. What he fails to mention is that the Clinton-era requirements came with childcare support and transitional Medicaid coverage to help families move into work. His bill includes none of those supports. Instead, it ties Medicaid eligibility to strict work rules while banning states from using waivers to soften the blow.

Like most Americans, I believe that programs like Medicaid should not only help people get back on their feet, but also into the workforce when possible. But the fact is, over 90% of people on Medicaid are already working, caregiving, in school, or have an illness or disability. Expanding work requirements won’t put more people to work; it will just bury families in paperwork and cause nearly 6 million Americans to lose their health care.

We’ve seen this play out at the state level before. In Arkansas, new work requirements caused one in four enrollees to lose coverage within seven months, all without increasing employment. Families with unstable work schedules — like retail and food service employees — would be the first to lose health care, with a survey finding that 43% of workers would fail to meet an 80-hour monthly work requirement at least once in a year.

If Finstad were serious about cutting waste and fraud in the health care system, he’d go after the big corporations that are driving up costs, not his own constituents. Today, just six health insurance companies are responsible for 30% of U.S. health spending, up from 10% in 2011. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies keep hiking prices on drugs that have been around for decades, while their CEOs get paid more than $100 million per year.

Here in southern Minnesota, families are paying much more for insulin and heart medication than right across the border in Canada, while Big Insurance and Big Pharma pocket the difference.

Finstad concludes his op-ed by saying “the most appalling factor in all of this is that Democrats would rather spew lies than get on board.” I could not disagree more. The most appalling factor is that Brad Finstad voted to take health care away from 140,000 Minnesotans in order to give billionaires a tax break.

We deserve a congressman who will protect Medicaid, keep our rural hospitals open, and stand up to the big corporations driving up costs. If Finstad ever held a town hall , he would hear that’s exactly what southern Minnesotans want.