Johnson has ruled out two of the biggest potential cuts: paying fixed, shrunken rates to states for care and changing the calculation for the share of federal dollars that each state receives for Medicaid. Just a few years ago, Johnson spearheaded a report that lobbied for some of those changes during the first Trump administration.
Johnson insisted in a CNN interview that the focus will instead be ferreting out ‘’fraud, waste and abuse, in Medicaid, although it’s unlikely to deliver the savings Republicans seek.
GOP pressure over Medicaid is mounting, with some state party leaders joining the calls to preserve the program. States are already struggling with the growing cost of sicker patients and could be left to cover more if the federal government pulls back. In some states, the federal government picks up over 80%.
More than a dozen Minnesota GOP lawmakers wrote the president recently warning that ‘’too deep of a cut is unmanageable in any instance.‘’ Gov. Joe Lombardo, R-Nev., told Congress in a letter that ‘’proposed reductions would put lives at risk.” In Alaska, state Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel, a Republican and nurse, cited ‘’huge concerns” during a floor speech.
Nationally, 55% of Americans said the government spends too little on Medicaid, according to a January poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
‘‘It’s now a very popular program that touches a very broad cross-section of American society,‘’ said Drew Altman, president of the health care research firm KFF. ‘’Roughly half of the American people say that they or a family member have at one time been served by the program.‘’
Source: Republicans once maligned Medicaid. Now some see a program too big to touch
