‘People in KY are going to die’ because of Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill | Opinion
In 2013, Sarah Hill came home to Prestonsburg after a stint with the Americorps program in California. Major depression, which had been a problem all her life, slammed her into a near catatonic state. She sat at her mother’s house, some days unable to even brush her teeth.
But in January 2014, the Medicaid expansion in Kentucky took effect. Hill was able to get enrolled, and get the medication she needed to manage her depression. Within a month, she’d gotten a job in nearby Paintsville, and in a few years later, she’d moved to Lexington to work at a community resource non-profit.
She was doing so well that she was able to get off Medicaid. But there’s no doubt in her mind that it saved her life.
“If I hadn’t had access to Medicaid, I don’t know what would have happened to me, to be honest,” Hill said. “I’ve been off Medicaid for more than a decade, but it gave me exactly what I needed to care for myself down the line.”
As an Eastern Kentucky native, she struggles to come up with the words to describe President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill, which will make major cuts to safety nets like Medicaid — which helps one in three Kentuckians access health care — in order to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.
“It is absolutely shocking,” Hill, now 40, said.
“Hal Rogers and Mitch McConnell have been my representatives the whole of my life. People in Kentucky are going to die because of this bill. Knowing what he knows, it is so shocking to me Hal Rogers would endorse it.”
The bill gained final passage on Thursday with all the Democrats, and two Republicans, including Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, voting no.
Rogers, of course, is touting the GOP party line that he is saving Medicaid by voting for the bill because it will stop undocumented immigrants from getting benefits. In fact, they are not eligible for regular Medicaid, although sometimes receive emergency benefits.
That’s not even getting to the cuts in the bill that affect food stamps, for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which currently helps one in eight Kentuckians. As Hill pointed out, cuts in both these programs will overwhelmingly hurt Eastern Kentuckians, where so many young people have moved away, leaving vulnerable older folks behind. Rural hospitals will close.
“These people need these safety nets to be in place for them,” Hill said. “It’s unconscionable that we would kick people out of nursing homes, take away their food stamps.”
Food pantries bracing for the Big Beautiful Bill
Just ask Nicky Stacy, founder of the Hazel Green Food Project in Wolfe County, where the lines of cars consistently surpass several miles down the road.
“We’re already bracing for this big beautiful bill,” Stacy told me on Thursday morning. “We started at about 1,000 households and now we’re up to 2,000. Once SNAP benefits are cut, it will double that because groceries are still so expensive, people can’t afford the basic necessities to live right now.”
Cuts to the U.S. Department of Agriculture are already affecting food banks and other nonprofits that send food to pantries like Hazel Green, particularly affecting local sourcing of vegetables and fruit.
“Politicians need to come here and see the faces in our food line,” Stacy said. “It might be a big beautiful bill, but it’s not going to make a beautiful Eastern Kentucky. With our economy, we are barely surviving.”
Volunteer Katrina Montgomery said it’s clear that Rogers and McConnell “don’t care about the people they represent. People are barely scraping by.”
And for people barely scraping by in Trump country, it’s hard to keep up with the ins and outs of a massive and complicated bill. As Stacy said, ‘Hunger is not a Democratic or Republican issue.
“I think maybe people are for a person, but they don’t really know what that person stands for.”
Of course, it’s easier to practice tribal politics, to be loyal to a party or charismatic leaders like Trump who promise to bring back the only prosperity many Eastern Kentuckians have ever known.
But let’s be very, very clear: This bill is one of the greatest betrayals of working-class Americans in U.S. history because it will sacrifice them to award more and bigger tax cuts to the wealthy. It’s a measure of how twisted and gaslit modern politics have become that Trump will so badly hurt the people who elected him.
The benefit cuts won’t take place until after the midterm elections, so it’s not even clear how big a political price Republicans will pay, if any.
But people like Sarah Hill and Nicky Stacy, and the thousands of other community advocates around Kentucky will remember because they are the ones trying to fill these gaps every single day to feed, house and employ people in a state that has been continually left behind by its Congressional leaders.
“Politicians have created this environment where we’re talking about transgender people as a distraction to these bigger issues,” Hill said. “I think people are tired, they’re working all the time, it’s hard to understand the full implications of these things, and how they are really going to affect them.
“This is all so scary to me, and it feels so morally wrong to let these people dangle in the wind.”
This story was originally published July 3, 2025 at 11:53 AM.
