Dems Screech About GOP ‘Gutting Medicaid’ While Ignoring Inconvenient Fact

Congressional Democrats have torched GOP lawmakers for working to “devastate Medicaid” in President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill,” ignoring fiscal projections that show federal Medicaid spending will continue to increase over the next decade anyways.

The House-passed version of the president’s sweeping tax cut and spending bill would reduce federal Medicaid spending by roughly $700 billion over a ten-year period, according to preliminary projections from the Congressional Budget Office. Though Democratic lawmakers have lambasted Republicans’ Medicaid reforms as an “attack on health care,” budget experts say the proposed savings do not cut Medicaid, but merely slow the growth of future spending.

“We’ve all heard how this bill will devastate Medicaid,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said during a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday. “It’s the largest cut in history … It shows the callousness of the Republican senators when it comes to health care. They don’t seem to care. They seem to say, ‘tough luck.’”

Experts and congressional scorekeepers’ analysis say federal spending on the program is not anticipated to decline over the next decade, but only slow down relative to previously projected levels.

The House Budget Committee found that federal Medicaid spending will still grow 30% by 2034 when taking into account House Republicans’ $698 billion in Medicaid savings in the initial House-passed bill.

“There aren’t real cuts; it’s just identifying opportunities for savings, so it’s not growing as fast or as much as it would in the absence of any reforms,” Hayden Dublois, data and analytics director at the Foundation for Government Accountability, a right-of-center public policy think tank, told the Daily Caller News Foundation