About a month into his second term as president, Donald Trump told Fox News interviews they shouldn’t worry about Republican plans for the nation’s largest health care programs. “Medicare, Medicaid, none of that stuff is going to be touched,” Trump said.
As the GOP’s domestic policy megabill — the inaptly named “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — took shape, the president’s promise related to Medicaid quickly evaporated. In fact, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the Republicans’ reconciliation package would cut Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming years.
But as the party tries to advance the legislation in the Senate and GOP leaders scramble to make their arithmetic work, the other part of Trump’s promise from February is suddenly in doubt, too. NBC News reported:
Looking at new ways to pay for their sprawling bill for President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda, Republicans are exploring ideas to slash ‘waste, fraud and abuse’ in Medicare, several senators said Thursday. And President Donald Trump has blessed the pursuit, they said.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune didn’t come right out and endorse Medicare cuts, but when asked whether his party would look for savings in the popular health care program, the South Dakota Republican told reporters, “I think anything that can be — that’s waste, fraud and abuse are open to, obviously, discussions.”
At this point, some readers are probably thinking that this topic sounds vaguely familiar. After all, didn’t The Washington Post already report recently on the GOP megabill and possible Medicare cuts?
The answer is yes, but the details matter. The Post highlighted the fact that the Republicans’ legislation would add so many trillions of dollars to the national debt that it might automatically trigger “sequestration” changes that would force massive Medicare cuts.
But there are budgetary tactics that Congress could, and likely would, take to prevent that from happening, which helps to explain why the Post’s reporting from mid-May didn’t have a greater political impact.
This week’s developments are qualitatively different: We’re not just talking about the possibility of Medicare cuts being triggered by automatic budget constraints; rather, Republican senators are making a deliberate choice to look for Medicare savings as a way to pay for the massive tax breaks the party is eager to deliver to the wealthy.
Time will tell what, if anything, comes of this, but Republican Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas told the Post that the discussions among GOP members of the Senate Finance Committee have focused on Medicare Advantage, a program through which the federal government pays private insurers to enroll Medicare beneficiaries.
The far-right Republican plan was already shaping up to be a political albatross for its proponents. Putting Medicare funding on the table probably won’t help matters.
