The Trump administration and Republicans broadly have said they can cut Medicaid’s budget without hurting patient care by finding efficiencies.
Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette, the top Democrat on a key health care panel, says that’s not so.
“We just simply don’t have that much money,” DeGette said at POLITICO’s Health Care Summit Wednesday.
President Donald Trump has tasked Republicans with figuring out how to pay for his agenda, which includes increased border security and an expansion of energy resources while cutting taxes. House leaders have said they can find $880 billion in savings to cover the bill.
Now, the House Energy and Commerce Committee on which DeGette serves is trying to figure out where the cuts will come from if they can’t find enough savings by eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. Democrats cite data from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office in arguing lawmakers will have to cut Medicaid, the publicly funded health insurance program that covers more than 75 million low-income Americans.
Earlier, Rep. Vern Buchanan (R- Fla.) told the audience at the summit that he’s not in favor of cuts to Medicaid, but that there might be ways to find the money without reducing benefits.
“There are a lot of inefficiencies. We’ve got to find a way to be able to … do things better for less,” he said.
DeGette doesn’t agree. The ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee’s Health Subcommittee, said she’s looked at other potential other areas they could cut to make up the $880 billion needed to fund Trump’s agenda.
“We realized all the rest of the spending in the Energy and Commerce Committee, all the rest of it is $500 billion. So if you zeroed out everything else that we do, you’d still be $330 billion short,” she said.
She also countered the idea that states could step in if the federal government cuts back its Medicaid contribution.
“This is going to hurt the red states the most because they won’t raise the money,” she said. “But it’s also going to hurt blue states like Colorado and California, where we have constitutional amendments that say you can’t deficit spend.”