The wildly unlikeable Vice President JD Vance returned to his home state of Ohio on Monday, speaking at a steel plant in Canton. When asked about the “hundreds of thousands of Ohioans” whose Medicaid coverage is in jeopardy as a result of President Donald Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” Vance simply lied.

“Well, what I’d say to those Ohioans is one: Don’t believe every false media report that you’ve heard because our explicit goal in the Trump administration is to protect people’s health care, so long as they’re working hard, playing by the rules,” he claimed. 

He then went on to make a false assertion about who will lose their Medicaid.

“Now, there have been a lot of lies out there. And if, for example, you’re an able-bodied person and you’re searching for work, you still got access to Medicaid. If you’re a single mom and you need access to that health care to make sure your kids can go see a doctor, you’re still going to have access to that Medicaid,” Vance said. “Who’s not going to have access to that Medicaid is people who are in the United States illegally and people who refuse to even look for a job.”

Meanwhile, an analysis from the Ohio-based Center for Community Solutions found that up to 450,000 Ohio residents are at risk of losing their health insurance once the GOP’s Medicaid work requirement waiver takes effect. 

The policy resembles Arkansas’ failed 2018-2019 experiment, which not only failed to boost employment but also increased red tape, causing more than 18,000 people to lose their health insurance.

The conservative myth that millions of people live comfortably by lazily subsisting off of meager entitlements has been debunked repeatedly. But now the Trump administration is pushing a new myth: that citizens will work low-wage jobs—vacant due to the mass deportations of immigrant workers—in exchange for the poor and often inaccessible health insurance available to farmworkers.

We’ll see how that works out.