By Howie Katz
When he campaigned for the presidency last year, Donald Trump repeatedly promised not to cut Medicaid. But what he calls the 'Big Beautiful Bill' contains deep cuts to Medicaid that, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, will cause 11.8 million people to lose their health insurance by 2034. Those are mostly the poor or the disabled who cannot afford private health insurance.
Trump justifies the cuts by claiming they only amount to the waste and fraud in the Medicaid program. And White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed the cuts are designed to kick 1.4 million illegal immigrants out of the program. If true, that's less than 12 percent of the people who will lose their health insurance.
It probably never occurred to Trump that the Medicaid cuts would be so devastating. And Leavitt is doing exactly what White House Press Secretaries are hired to do ... and that is to lie for the administration.
Is there waste and fraud in Medicaid? Of course there is. Every federal agency and program is fraught with waste and fraud. You can bet that the waste and fraud in just the Defense Department amounts to far more than the combined budgets of Medicare and Medicaid.
And it's not the recipients of Medicaid that are committing the fraud. It's the doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, pharmacies and other providers that are the ones committing it. 11.8 million Medicaid recipients are being punished for the wrongdoing of the providers.
That's why I'm calling it Trump's Big Ugly Bill. I do like parts of that bill, but shame on President Trump for breaking his repeated promise not to cut Medicaid.
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