Tommy Tuberville talks about his Christian faith often. On Wednesday, a reporter used one of the most famous lines Jesus ever spoke, and it left Tuberville puzzled.
Then he gave a "good job" to a Trump administration purge that took health coverage away from hundreds of thousands of people.
"Punishing what?"
A Raw Story reporter caught up with Tuberville and asked him about the administration's move to cut hundreds of thousands of people from Obamacare. "Some of the people say your party's, you know, punishing 'the least of these,'" the reporter said.
"Punishing what? 'The least of these?'" Tuberville asked.
The reporter explained it was a biblical reference, from Matthew 25:40: "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." It's the verse where Jesus says that how you treat the poor, the sick and the hungry is how you treat him.
"The least of these?" Tuberville asked again. Then: "Well, we're all getting punished. We're all in the same boat."
We're not. Tuberville is a U.S. senator with a salary and taxpayer-subsidized health coverage. The people losing their plans are not in his boat.
What he was cheering
On Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance and Medicare and Medicaid chief Mehmet Oz announced that the government was canceling about 315,000 enrollments covering 760,000 people in Affordable Care Act marketplace plans, citing fraud. Another 419,000 enrollments face extra checks. Vance said the move would save $2.2 billion.
Tuberville's answer: "Yeah. I mean, good job. This is the first group that ever tried to clean it up. We're losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day to fraud. We can't afford it."
Nobody should defend real fraud. But the administration didn't explain how it picked who to cut, or how those people were told. Health experts are asking exactly that. "I think the question is whether this was the appropriate process by which to identify fraudulent enrollees, and also whether all of them were indeed fraudulently enrolled," KFF's Cynthia Cox told the Associated Press. She said the cuts were made outside the normal rulemaking process. Ellen Montz, who oversaw the marketplaces at Medicare and Medicaid under President Biden, said she expected to hear from people asking, "why did my enrollment get cancelled?"
And look at the numbers side by side. Tuberville said fraud costs "hundreds of millions of dollars a day." The administration's own estimate of what this whole purge saves is $2.2 billion.
Alabama was already losing coverage
The people Tuberville says are "in the same boat" were already struggling before this week. When Congress let the extra ACA tax credits expire this year, premiums doubled or tripled for many people, and millions dropped their plans or switched to worse ones.
That didn't have to happen. On December 11, 2025, the Senate voted on whether to even start debating a bill to extend those tax credits. Tuberville voted no, and the bill died. We've covered what that meant at home: Alabama's Obamacare enrollment fell by 95,000 after the credits ran out.
Tuberville is now running for governor of Alabama, asking to run the state where those families live.
In summary
When a reporter asked Tommy Tuberville about critics who say Republicans are punishing "the least of these," the Bible verse left him puzzled, and he said "we're all in the same boat." In the same interview he called the administration's cancellation of ACA coverage for 760,000 people a "good job," even though health experts say the government hasn't shown how it decided who to cut. Tuberville also voted in December 2025 against even debating an extension of the ACA tax credits whose expiration was followed by a 95,000-person drop in Alabama's Obamacare enrollment.
Source
Bible verse trips up Tommy Tuberville — as he compares himself to America's poorest — Raw Story. Photo: Reuters/Kylie Cooper, via Raw Story.
