WASHINGTON ― House Republicans who voted to pass President Donald Trump’s tax bill last week know it’s going to slash the federal Medicaid program by $1 trillion and kick millions of people off of their health care.
But that sounds bad. And people already hate this law. So instead of saying that, Republicans are trying out a new way of talking about the bill they all voted for: just pretend they voted to increase Medicaid spending!
“I don’t know how you can call any of this a cut when we are increasing Medicaid expenditures by $200 billion,” Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.) falsely claimed Tuesday on a conservative podcast, “The Bob Cordaro Show.”
Later in the show, Bresnahan also falsely claimed the law will lead to “the largest deficit reduction in, I think, what will be 30 years.”
It’s not clear what the Pennsylvania Republican is talking about regarding the $200 billion, but he is being misleading at best and lying at worst. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has clearly laid out how Trump’s tax-and-spending law will cut $1 trillion from Medicaid and increase the deficit by nearly $3.3 trillion over the next 10 years.
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A Bresnahan spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
In the same interview, he tried to tout that the law includes a new $50 billion fund to help rural hospitals survive the bill’s devastating Medicaid cuts. But it’s just simple math that $50 billion is nowhere near enough money to offset $1 trillion ― or 20 times more ― in cuts.
Rep. Gabe Evans (R-Colo.), meanwhile, mused that there’s been “a ton” of misinformation about the tax law and said it actually increases federal Medicaid spending, which is false.
“Under this bill, there will be more federal money going into Medicaid under the Republican plan every single year for the forecastable duration of this bill,” Evans said last Thursday on the public radio show, “Here & Now Anytime.”
Asked what he is talking about, Evans’ spokesperson Delanie Bomer said he is referring to the fact that Medicaid costs generally tend to increase every year ― a laughably weird point to make that entirely glosses over Republicans cutting $1 trillion from the program.
Evans is essentially arguing that while the bill may cut $1 trillion from Medicaid and kick millions of people off of health care, the government is still paying for the increased annual costs of health care for whoever can still get Medicaid benefits. He’s not talking about the elephant in the room, which is all the people who won’t have health coverage at all.
“Medicaid spending is always going up,” Bomer said of Evans’ argument. “It’s just going up at a lesser degree” because Trump’s tax law will strip $1 trillion from the program.
Asked why Evans voted for such a devastating cut to Medicaid, Bomer said the GOP congressman doesn’t want “illegal immigrants to receive taxpayer-funded health care” and wants to make sure people meet work requirements to qualify for Medicaid benefits.
Except undocumented immigrants are generally not eligible for Medicaid. And hospitals can’t turn them away if they need medical attention, meaning the hospitals already on the tightest financial footing — rural hospitals in particular, which serve a lot of Medicaid patients — will be hardest hit by the loss in dollars. The work requirements argument is also misleading, because Trump’s tax law imposes such strict new requirements that people who would otherwise qualify for Medicaid are now likely to fall through the cracks.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) is testing out a different new way to talk about his vote for Trump’s tax law: He’s trying to take credit for Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) and the state legislature rushing to pass a state budget in order to lock in a higher match of federal dollars for Medicaid in the state under Trump’s law.
Because Wisconsin state leaders moved quickly to do this, the state will get $1 billion in new annual funding. In more than a dozen social media posts, Van Orden keeps insisting that if it weren’t for him, his governor and state legislature wouldn’t have gotten this money.
Except Van Orden had nothing to do with their efforts.
“Congressman Van Orden never personally advocated to the governor or our office for the hospital assessment provision to be included in the state budget until after it was clearly already part of the state budget, he had nothing to do with the hospital assessment being part of bipartisan state budget negotiations with Republican leaders, and he had nothing to do with the fact that the governor decided to enact the state budget before the federal reconciliation bill was signed,” Evers’ spokesperson Britt Cudaback told HuffPost on Tuesday.
Asked why he keeps trying to take credit for this $1 billion when it appears he had nothing to do with it, Van Orden said the fact that the governor signed the state budget into law at a late hour shows they were listening to him.
“The only reason [Evers] signed the bill at 1:30 a.m. was to make the deadline I spoke and wrote to him about,” he told HuffPost. “Period. Do that math.”
