The Trump administration is pulling out all the stops to encourage red states to make conservative changes to Medicaid without congressional input.
Administration officials are pushing ahead and granting approvals to states seeking to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, even in the face of legal challenges and large-scale losses in the number of people covered.
Last week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) granted Ohio’s request for work requirements, the ninth such approval since President Trump took office.
Trump’s budget for the next fiscal year was released on Monday, and it’s just as bad as you can imagine.
In it, Trump proposes gutting social safety-net programs, like food stamps, while at the same time working to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with the same health care bill Republicans failed to pass in 2017, which would kick 21 million Americans off the insurance rolls.
Trump’s budget also proposes further health care cuts, including nixing zero-premium plans on the ACA exchanges and demanding that all Americans “contribute something.” That could raise costs for millions of poorer Americans who currently pay $0 in health care subsidies in the ACA exchange.
Americans will not be fooled into allowing Mick Mulvaney to make what he deemed “easy” cuts to earned benefits.
Opponents of Social Security and Medicare are so eager to end these two overwhelmingly important and popular earned benefits that they can’t contain themselves. Mick Mulvaney, the Trump administration’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the latest to make crystal clear the longstanding plan to destroy both programs.
Speaking at a conference of state legislators hosted by the anti-government American Legislative Exchange Council (“ALEC”), Mulvaney just revealed that he plans first to go after what he sees as more politically achievable cuts. He explained that the next step, presumably after Trump is in his second term, will be for the administration not just to cut these programs but to end them as we know them.
Mulvaney is apparently so eager to go after our earned benefits that he threw the point into a speech to state legislators, even though both Social Security and Medicare are federal programs.
After instituting a $1.5 trillion tax cut and signing off on a $675 billion budget for the Department of Defense, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that the only way to lower the record-high federal deficit would be to cut entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
“It’s disappointing, but it’s not a Republican problem,” McConnell said of the deficit, which grew 17 percent to $779 billion in fiscal year 2018. McConnell explained to Bloomberg that “it’s a bipartisan problem: Unwillingness to address the real drivers of the debt by doing anything to adjust those programs to the demographics of America in the future.” The deficit has increased 77 percent since McConnell became majority leader in 2015.
New Treasury Department analysis on Monday revealed that corporate tax cuts had a significant impact on the deficit this year. Federal revenue rose by 0.04 percent in 2018, a nearly 100 percent decrease on last year’s 1.5 percent. In fiscal year 2018, tax receipts on corporate income fell to $205 billion from $297 billion in 2017.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) speaks with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) about Medicare for All legislation on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., September 2017. Credit: Getty/Jim Watson/AFP
The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have an undeniably poor record on health care. In addition to repeatedly threatening to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and pushing for devastating cuts to programs such as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), majority leaders have increased costs for consumers and undermined critical protections for all individuals who need comprehensive health care coverage. Recognizing that Medicare funding and health care more broadly are top priorities for voters, however, Republicans are deploying last-minute scare tactics to manipulate voters ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. Congressional Democrats, they claim, are looking to gut Medicare in order to pay for Medicare for All.
In August, Rep. Bruce Poliquin (R-ME) began running an ad campaign that calls his Democratic challenger, Jared Golden, a “radical liberal politician [whose] risky scheme will end Medicare as we know it.” Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY) has been running similar ads, which portray her opponent’s support for Medicare for All as a dangerous “scheme that could bankrupt Medicare.” On September 6, 2018, former Governor of Florida and current senatorial candidate Rick Scott (R) tweeted, “If you want to protect Medicare, vote Republican. If you want a socialist experiment with Medicare, by all means vote Democrat.”
Even President Donald Trump has adopted this messaging. In August, the president threatened that Democrats are seeking to “raid Medicare to pay for socialism.” At a September rally in Montana, he claimed that Democrats are “going to hurt your Social Security so badly, and they’re killing you on Medicare.”
The following article by Rebekah Entralgo was posted on the ThinkProgress website August 21, 2018:
“I do think we need to deal with some of our spending.”
Republicans who supported the trillion dollar Trump tax bill are revealing their true motivations: Slashing Medicare and Social Ssecurity. Credit: Getty Images
Slowly but surely, Republicans that supported the trillion dollar Trump tax bill are revealing their true motivations: slashing Medicare and Social Security.
During a Sunday interview with CNBC’s John Harwood, Rep. Steve Stivers (R-OH) urged entitlement reform as the deficit continues to balloon as a result of the GOP tax cuts.
“I do think we need to deal with some of our spending,” Stivers said. “We’ve got try to figure out how to spend less.”
The Trump administration is pulling out all the stops to encourage red states to make conservative changes to Medicaid without congressional input.
