'Alarming': This popular program could become 'politically radioactive' for Trump

During his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump insisted that cuts to Social Security and Medicare would not be on the table if he won the election. Trump didn't have as much to say about Medicaid on the campaign trail, but in late January — after returning to the White House — the president claimed he will "love and cherish" Medicaid along with Social Security and Medicare.

Nonetheless, Trump's Democratic critics are worried about the future of Medicaid as well as Social Security and Medicare and remain deeply skeptical when he promises to protect those programs.

In an article published by Politico, Joanne Kenen — thejournalist-in-residence at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore — offers some reasons why the Medicaid issue could become "politically radioactive" for Trump and other Republicans.

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"Republicans may have just gotten an alarming glimpse of the future," Kenen reports. "Amid the chaos of President Donald Trump's now-rescinded domestic funding freeze, Medicaid portals across the country went offline, which meant states couldn’t get their Medicaid dollars. It was something the (Trump) Administration said was never supposed to happen and which provoked public outrage and a bipartisan outcry."

Kenen continues, "Now, Republicans are considering whether and how to target Medicaid as part of their effort to defray the cost of massive tax cuts, the centerpiece of Trump's legislative agenda. With full GOP control of Washington, the question at the start of the year seemed to be not whether Medicaid would be cut but by how much."

Kenen emphasizes that for Republicans, "going after Medicaid will be harder than it looks," as "the program has evolved and expanded significantly over the years" and "some 80 million people now get health care from Medicaid, including many working-class voters in the president's base."

"Public opinion surveys detect growing popularity for Medicaid across the political spectrum," Kenen observes. "And in the seven states that have had ballot initiatives on Medicaid expansion, it's won with striking margins. That includes deep-red places like Idaho and Utah. A 2024 poll conducted by the nonprofit health research organization KFF found that 71 percent of voters wanted Medicaid to remain more or less the way it is today, including more than half of Republicans. And 77 percent of people surveyed recently viewed the program favorably, including 63 percent of GOP respondents."

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Read the full Politico article at this link.