The Trump administration was out in force this Sunday spreading lies about the disastrous effects of the proposed Republican so-called tax cut for the rich "health care" bill.
As Ryan Koronowski at Think Progress discussed today, the bill being proposed by the Senate "makes massive cuts to Medicaid. But you wouldn’t know that just from listening to Trump administration officials on the Sunday shows."
“These are not cuts to Medicaid, George,” Kellyanne Conway told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
“It just wouldn’t happen,” Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price told CNN’s Dana Bash when asked about Republican concerns over Medicaid cuts.
“Nobody will fall through the cracks,” Price said on Fox News Sunday when asked about the Medicaid coverage gap. (Fox’s Brit Hume did not ask about Medicaid cuts specifically, focusing more on conservative criticism of the bill.)
While there’s no polling yet on the Senate bill, most Americans don’t know the House-passed bill would make significant cuts to Medicaid. Just 38 percent of respondents knew about the cuts.
Those cuts are even deeper in the Senate version, experts say, and media appearances like these make it less surprising that the public isn’t aware of the drastic changes the legislation would introduce.
The Senate bill’s main advocate and author, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), actually tried to argue that the bill will strengthen Medicaid when he introduced it last Thursday on the Senate floor. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) argued on CBS’ Face the Nation that the bill would “make permanent” Medicaid expansion and also said “no one loses coverage.”
The bill would in fact massively cut Medicaid, threatening to completely phase out the program as we currently know it. The legislation would roll back Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, starting in four short years. It would also make deeper cuts to Medicaid by placing “per capita caps” on the program such that states will receive only a set amount of money for each recipient, no matter how much their care actually costs.
Andy Slavitt, who ran Medicaid in the Obama administration, said on Twitter that “the main event in the Senate bill is the destruction of Medicaid,” characterizing it as “far, far worse than even the House bill.” And the House bill, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office, would leave 23 million more people without coverage.
But Trump administration officials presented alternative facts on Sunday.
As he noted, these cuts are a reversal of what Trump promised on the campaign trail when he said: “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican, and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” That's exactly what these proposals do, despite the fact that all of their surrogates are denying that reducing Medicaid by $834 billion is just that, a cut.
Sadly Price got very little push back from Bash during his interview on CNN. ABC's George Stephanopoulos did a slightly better job with that gaslighting Kellyanne Conway who was spewing the same nonsense.
