The U.S. House of Representatives’ budget for the 2025 fiscal year calls for $1.7 trillion in spending cuts. $880 billion of that would be taken from Medicaid, a program that provides one in five U.S. residents with health care coverage.
Since the proposal of this budget, residents have called on their legislators to oppose the cuts. Republican Ryan Mackenzie, who won the Lehigh Valley seat from Democrat Susan Wild in November, has been the target of many of these calls since voicing his support for the cuts.
Some residents have launched weekly protests, named ‘Mondays with Mackenzie,’ outside his Allentown office. The website for the event calls for participants to “stand up for our community and say no to billionaires.”
On Thursday, Mackenzie held a telephone town hall. Disappointed with Mackenzie’s lack of response to their concerns, Protect Our Care, along with several other organizations in the region, held their own Medicaid Accountability Town Hall that night.
In a statement, Lamont McClure, who announced his plans last month to run against Mackenzie in 2026, called out the Republican for hiding “behind the cover of a telephone town hall” while hundreds of his constituents attended the rivaling in-person event in Bethlehem. Organizers say they did invite Mackenzie to attend.
Physicians statewide are joining the conversation as well. In a statement from the Committee to Protect Health Care, Dr. Tom Whalen, a pediatric surgeon from Allentown, emphasized that working Pennsylvanians without employer-provided healthcare rely on Medicaid. He told the story of one of his trauma victims; a three-year-old who was hit in the chest with a stray bullet and made a full recovery thanks to Medicaid. He called on Mackenzie to protect the health assistance that allows that kind of lifesaving care.
At his town hall, Mackenzie batted down a claim that he was voting for Medicaid cuts, instead saying he voted for a “continuing resolution” that lays the groundwork for a final federal budget.
