On Saturday afternoon, Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) strode into Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Levittown with Medicaid on his mind.
Hosted by the DNC and DCCC as part of their “Fight to Save Medicaid” month of action, Gallego and local Democrats hosted a town hall and talked about health care, the Trump administration, and state and local politics, with much of the discussion focused on the local incumbent Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick – who has notably refused to hold public in-person town halls for years.
Recently, Republicans in Congress have been in negotiation and drafting legislation about cuts to the federal budget. They want to pass a full budget bill by Memorial Day. The current budget resolution – which Fitzpatrick has voted for – directs the House Committee on Energy and Commerce to cut $880 billion from programs it oversees, which includes Medicaid. Earlier in the year, the House Budget Committee released a specific plan.
Gallego spoke about Fitzpatrick’s powerful influence on the future of Medicaid nationally. To pass the bill in the House and Senate, Republicans could only afford to lose four votes in each. These slim margins could determine the fate of healthcare in the country.
“It is his decision whether he’s going to cut millions of people off of health care, and millions and millions of Pennsylvanians,” Gallego said.
In 2025, 90,732 people in Bucks County enrolled in Medicaid, which is 14 percent of the population. If the bill gets passed, Pennsylvania’s first congressional district, according to estimates from the Center for American Progress, would lose $1.31 billion in Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program funding over 9 years.
Gallego also emphasized the need for Democrats’ campaign messaging to change, saying that swing voters aren’t as politically involved as the attendees. He added that many of these voters are busy working long shifts to pay bills, save for a future house, and may have even voted for Trump in the past election.
In a Arizona, a swing state similarly as competitive as Pennsylvania, Gallego defeated MAGA Republican Kari Lake in a tight senatorial race determined by 80,000 votes. On the campaign trail, Gallego heard from a number of voters, including Republicans, struggling financially.
“They told me I’m very frustrated that I can’t buy a house, that I’m still living with my parents, that my business is not taking off, and I’m so sick of just feeling this way,” Gallego said. “What I didn’t hear was that I want random tariffs. What I didn’t hear was that I want my family to be torn from me without due process … But that’s not what they voted for. Let’s talk to them as Americans, not as Trump voters.”
In speaking with the Bucks County Beacon, Gallego commented on the progression of budget legislation through Congress. Most recently, on May 7, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that House Republicans stopped considering decreasing the federal government’s aid for states to provide care Medicaid for working-age adults who became eligible through its 2014 expansion.
READ: Medicaid Cuts in Republican Bill Would Charge Poor People More for Coverage
“What we’ve seen is the hesitancy by the Republicans more and more, closer they get to that deciding day, that they are trying to find any wiggly way out of it,” Gallego said. “We just need to keep the pressure on them all the way, so either they have to make a really hard decision that makes voters understand that these representatives, Republicans, are not on my side, or they’re going to stick with us and protect and save Medicaid.”
Local residents threw a round of questions at Gallego involving the rising cost of pharmaceuticals, Medicaid cuts leading to the overuse of emergency rooms and halting funding for elderly in long term care, and the failure of the Democratic Party’s messaging in 2024.
Addressing the correlation of Medicaid cuts and emergency rooms, Gallego said people on Medicaid’s expansion will likely go to clinics until they get full, and then frequent emergency rooms.
“Emergency rooms will start becoming their primary care physicians. Those hospitals don’t get paid and don’t get compensated enough,” Gallego said. “And they’ll eventually figure out that they’re going to have to close the emergency rooms.”
As for messaging, Gallego said Democrats are “too effing safe all the time” conducting interviews on CNN and MSNBC, but not Fox or podcasts that may not be aligned with their politics. Participating in the latter forms of media, as Gallego said, may draw in voters who rarely thought about politics until they voted for Trump.
“The question people will incorrectly think about is like, oh, wow, what’s wrong with them?” Gallego asked. “No, what’s wrong with us? What are we doing wrong that we aren’t breaking the barrier, that we aren’t getting to them?”
In an interview with the Beacon, DNC Vice Chair Malcolm Kenyatta, who also gave a speech at Saturday’s event, said he often hears from Republicans and independents at town halls who say they are frustrated by the Trump administration’s actions and about high costs and bills.
“This is an administration that is out of control, and we are in a district with a guy who used to work in law enforcement, who took an oath multiple times to uphold the Constitution. I’ve heard him say nothing about this,” Kenyatta said. “So he doesn’t care about rising costs, he doesn’t care about the rule of law. He doesn’t care about standing up to Donald Trump. What the hell is Brian Fitzpatrick here for?”
Fitzpatrick already has an opponent for the 2026 midterms: Bob Harvie. Harvie, the chair of the Bucks County Board of Commissioners and a former Falls Township supervisor, spoke about the seemingly diminishing American dream – for both young and old. With senior citizens worried about losing healthcare and young families unable to buy a house, Harvie said it is harder to “put down roots” than it was almost a century ago, which is important for the soul of the nation.
“Look, across the street is one of the most perfect embodiments and examples of the American dream in the history of this country, Levittown. 17,000 houses built in the 1950s for people who never thought they’d have a house with a yard and a driveway and tree-lined streets,” Harvie said. “And they did. And those people built this county, and people like them all over the country built this nation.”
Harvie didn’t miss the chance to criticize his Republican opponent, whom he has not seen making progress for the county. Yet, he rounded out his critique with a call to action of caring about and participating in local elections.
“We know what the last 100 days have done. We’ve seen the last 100 days and the impact … what’s Brian Fitzpatrick done? We know he doesn’t do town halls,” said Harvie. “We see him on Facebook, we see him taking pictures with kids at little league games, but we don’t see him standing up to protect the Department of Education so those same kids can get [a] good education … We see him taking pictures with senior citizens. We don’t see him standing up to protect Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.”
