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There’s no shortage of controversies surrounding the House Republicans’ far-right budget plan, but at the top of the list is what the party has in store for Medicaid. It’s easy to understand why: GOP officials seem to realize that it’s not a great look for Republicans to cut taxes for the wealthy while simultaneously taking health care benefits from low-income families.
Party leaders have gone out of their way to claim that the House GOP budget blueprint does not include Medicaid cuts. In fact, they said, it doesn’t even mention the health care program at all.
“It doesn’t even mention Medicaid in the bill,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters. “The word ‘Medicaid’ is not even in this bill,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise added. “This bill doesn’t even mention the word ‘Medicaid’ a single time.”
It’s not nearly that simple. As The New York Times reported:
The budget resolution itself is silent on whether Congress cuts Medicaid, which provides health coverage to 72 million poor and disabled Americans. But it instructs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the program, to cut spending by $880 billion over the next decade.
In other words, the House Republicans’ budget plan doesn’t literally cut Medicaid, it simply directs the House committee that oversees Medicaid to find deep cuts that can only be found in Medicaid.
Indeed, some GOP members have been willing to acknowledge publicly what is plainly true. Republican Rep. Russ Fulcher of Idaho, for example, who sits on the Energy and Commerce Committee, recently told The Hill, “There’s only one place you can go, and that’s Medicaid. That’s where the money is. There’s others, don’t get me wrong, but if you’re gonna get to $900 billion, something has to be reformed on the Medicaid front.”
I’m mindful of the larger partisan circumstances. Donald Trump, for example, vowed on Fox News last week that Medicaid would go untouched during his presidency. Around the same time, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said, “I don’t like the idea of massive Medicaid cuts.”
Similarly, media personality Steve Bannon warned GOP officials a week earlier, “Medicaid, you gotta be careful. Because a lot of MAGAs are on Medicaid, I’m telling you. If you don’t think so, you are dead wrong.”
With this in mind, there’s no great mystery as to why House Republicans are playing a shell game with their budget plan, but that doesn’t make their deceptive claims true.
What’s more, it’s important to emphasize just how much damage the GOP blueprint, if implemented, would do to the program. We’re talking about a plan that would cut $880 billion over the next decade, which is more than just a little trim. Even if Republicans were to impose new work restrictions on Medicaid recipients, that would (a) represent a cut of its own; and (b) produce savings of roughly $100 billion over 10 years according to the Congressional Budget Office. The remaining cuts would necessarily have to include additional cuts to health care benefits for struggling families.
If you went through the Republicans’ budget plan line by line, it’s true that you wouldn’t find references to Medicaid cuts — but that doesn’t mean they’re not there.