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.

Notably, the government spends a staggering 51% more on Medicaid today than it did in 2019.

Dublois also refuted some Democrats’ accusations that the GOP’s Medicaid reforms are targeted at the poor.

“The savings are concentrated in areas that protect the most vulnerable, like focusing on illegal aliens receiving Medicaid, rampant waste, fraud and abuse in the program, and able-bodied adults who can work but are refusing to,” Dublois said.

Schumer dodged a question about whether he believes illegal migrants should receive Medicaid benefits through state-funded programs when pressed by the DCNF Wednesday afternoon.

Medicaid spending is also projected to exceed the 2019 CBO projection, even after accounting for medical inflation and population growth, according to Jeremy Nighohossian, senior fellow and economist with the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Republican Rep. Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, who chairs the House committee responsible for the Medicaid reforms, recently stated that although the bill’s cost-saving measures are aimed at slowing the program’s growth, Medicaid expenditures were still forecasted to rise by more than $1 trillion above inflation by 2034.

“Only Washington Democrats would characterize increased funding as a cut,” Guthrie said.

It remains to be seen whether all of the House-proposed Medicaid reforms will survive in the Senate. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and moderate GOP senators have suggested they will oppose a House provision establishing a freeze on provider taxes, citing their potential impact on rural hospitals.

However, the imposition of work requirements for certain able-bodied, childless adults has broad support among congressional Republicans who have defended the reforms as preserving the entitlement program’s benefits for those in need.

‘We’re not cutting Medicaid,” Speaker Mike Johnson told NBC’s Kristen Welker on Sunday. “What we’re doing is strengthening the program. We’re reducing fraud, waste and abuse that is rampant in Medicaid to ensure … that it’s available for the most vulnerable.”

“What we’re doing here is an important and frankly heroic thing, to preserve the program so that it doesn’t become insolvent,” Johnson added.