U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins claimed Medicaid is “bankrupting” the states, while suggesting that “healthy” foods could serve to help reduce health care costs. Yet both Medicaid and nutrition programs like SNAP were slashed under President Donald Trump and Republicans’ so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was signed into law just ten days ago.
“Medicaid is bankrupting almost every state,” Secretary Rollins claimed in remarks on Monday (video below).
With the Republicans gutting over $1 trillion in federal Medicaid funds, and approximately $200 billion in SNAP funds, states face either picking up that massive shortfall or cutting some programs, benefits, or users.
Medicaid is “taking between 30, 40, 45, 50 percent of the state budgets, and has for a really long time, for those of us who come from state policy, we know this very, very well,” Rollins continued. State funds for Medicaid (not including federal matching funds) account for less than 20 percent of state budgets, overall, according to the Pew Research Center.
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Secretary Rollins previously served as a policy director for Texas Governor Rick Perry and led the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation. More recently, she headed the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank dedicated to advancing President Trump’s first post-presidency agenda.
Rollins decried what she says is the number one purchase using SNAP funds: “sugary drinks and junk food.”
“Frankly, we have to make a change,” she insisted.
“So there is a lot of wholesale across the government that we can do, but there’s also a recognition that a lot of these communities that are part of the Medicaid program, they don’t always have access to healthy food,” Rollins continued, not mentioning the billions the BBB Act gutted from both.
Rollins insisted the federal government has to do “a better job through our nutrition programs, through our partnerships, et cetera, of ensuring that those communities have access to healthy foods.”
“So on the back end, we have programs that are not bankrupting our government.”
Watch the video below or at this link.