The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) finds that the Senate Republicans’ budget bill will slash $1 trillion from Medicaid, but according to Kevin Hassett, the White House Director of the National Economic Council, no one’s Medicaid is being taken away.
The CBO projects the current Republican Senate budget bill will cut $930 billion from Medicaid, but an amendment from Florida GOP Senator Rick Scott would make additional cuts of $313 billion, for a total of $1.24 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, according to The Hill.
But according to the White House’s Kevin Hassett, “we’re not taking away anybody’s Medicaid.”
After Fox News host Bill Hemmer told Hassett on Monday that the White House is “getting hammered on these Medicaid cuts,” Hassett, chuckling, said: “The bottom line is that we’re just, we’re not taking away anybody’s Medicaid. We’re definitely not taking away anybody’s Medicare.”
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Hassett insisted that Republicans are merely “going after waste, fraud, and abuse,” and claimed “there’s a heck of a lot of it out there.”
Some experts put the waste, fraud, and abuse numbers—which can include improper payments and errors—at about five percent of Medicaid spending.
Hassett appears to disagree.
“A lot of budget savings have been found by people really in the House, in the Senate—not just conservatives—moderates agree that there’s a lot of money that can be saved. And the bottom line is that we’re, in the end going to balance this budget, and we’ve got to balance this budget by getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse, and we’re going to do it.”
The Congressional Budget Office, according to KFF, has also estimated that by 2034 there will be an additional 16 million more uninsured people if the bill is signed into law.
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“The scale of the proposed reductions in Medicaid is unprecedented in the history of the program, which has tended to expand coverage over time since its creation in 1965,” The New York Times reports.
Calling the cuts “savings,” the Times reports the bill in part “would establish a new, strict national work requirement for some people on the program, who would need to demonstrate they had worked at least 80 hours the month before they sign up, or qualified for an exemption.”
More cuts to Medicaid in the bill could be coming. The Times also reports that U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Sunday “told reporters that he would propose an amendment that would cut Medicaid even further.”
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