{"id":60213,"date":"2025-07-18T11:19:38","date_gmt":"2025-07-18T15:19:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=60213"},"modified":"2025-07-18T11:19:38","modified_gmt":"2025-07-18T15:19:38","slug":"exactly-what-does-the-big-beautiful-bill-do-to-medicaid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=60213","title":{"rendered":"Exactly What Does The Big Beautiful Bill Do To Medicaid?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On Wednesday, <a href=\"https:\/\/dailycaller.com\/2025\/07\/16\/democrats-medicaid-meltdown-totally-ignores-inconvenient-facts\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Daily Caller<\/a> posted an article about the impact of the Big Beautiful Bill on Medicaid.<\/p>\n<p>The article reports:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><strong>Signed into law by President Donald Trump on <a href=\"https:\/\/dailycaller.com\/2025\/07\/03\/big-beautiful-bill-trumps-desk\/\">July 4<\/a>, the GOP\u2019s sweeping tax and spending package projects over $1 trillion in savings from Medicaid reforms. While Democrats have portrayed the changes as an unprecedented assault on the health care system, they ignore the explosive surge in Medicaid spending over the past decade and mischaracterize reforms that mainly target a widely exploited funding loophole and nonworking, able-bodied enrollees.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><strong>\u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing from the left and special interest groups are blanket fear-based arguments against the proposal,\u201d Nina Owcharenko Schaefer, director of the Center for Health and Welfare Policy at the Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. \u201cThese are just common-sense changes that tighten up the existing structure of the Medicaid program, weed out fraud, waste and abuse, and help the system function better.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The article explain one way the Medicaid system is exploited:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><strong>Just a day before the bill\u2019s passage, a rural hospital in Nebraska <a href=\"https:\/\/thehill.com\/homenews\/senate\/5384921-sanders-nebraska-medical-center-closure-after-gop-bill\/\">announced<\/a> that it would be shutting down, citing \u201canticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid.\u201d Democrat Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont <a href=\"https:\/\/thehill.com\/homenews\/senate\/5384921-sanders-nebraska-medical-center-closure-after-gop-bill\/\">warned<\/a> it would be the \u201cfirst of many hospitals to close\u201d because of the \u201chorrific cuts.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><strong>Yet, many of the key reforms \u2014 including the crackdown on \u201cprovider taxes,\u201d which critics describe as a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cato.org\/blog\/unmasking-medicaid-money-laundering-schemes-medicaid-financing-gimmicks-101\">gimmick<\/a> used by states to inflate Medicaid costs and extract more federal dollars \u2014 will not take effect until 2028.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><strong>The federal government matches a portion of each state\u2019s Medicaid expenditures. To maximize this match, many states tax hospitals and other healthcare providers, then return that money to them as Medicaid payments, creating the appearance of higher state Medicaid spending.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><strong>\u201cProvider taxes are basically funding gimmicks and legalized money laundering that allow states to scheme federal taxpayers into footing the bill for bailouts to hospitals,\u201d said Dublois.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The article concludes:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><strong>Democrats such as New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, have <a href=\"https:\/\/democrats-energycommerce.house.gov\/media\/press-releases\/new-report-republicans-burdensome-medicaid-red-tape-requirements-will-not\">claimed<\/a> that work requirements \u201cwill result in millions of Americans losing health care coverage and getting sicker due to bureaucratic paperwork requirements,\u201d while some corporate media outlets have <a href=\"https:\/\/www.axios.com\/2025\/07\/14\/medicaid-work-rules-states-requirements\">argued<\/a>\u00a0states would struggle to build systems to track compliance.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><strong>However, with implementation still years away, Dublois said states have a \u201clengthy runway to get this done,\u201d adding that \u201c[Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] provides guidance to those states well in advance of when those work requirements need to be implemented, and there will be CMS grant funds available to states to help implement them.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><strong>State Medicaid agency data obtained by the FGA through Freedom of Information Act requests reveal that <a href=\"https:\/\/thefga.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Welfare-Work-Requirements-LSG-paper-03-24-25.pdf\">62%<\/a> of non-elderly, able-bodied individuals on Medicaid did not work. Additionally, the American Enterprise Institute found in May that Medicaid recipients who do not work spend 4.2 hours per day \u2014 or 125 hours a month \u2014 watching TV and playing video games, more than 50% above the 80-hour work requirement.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><strong>\u201cIt\u2019s the common-sense parts of the bill that are hard for liberals to argue against, so they don\u2019t want to look at what\u2019s actually in the bill,\u201d said Schaefer. \u201cA lot of the fearmongering out there is saying, \u2018We just want the status quo to run as is. Let\u2019s keep our heads in the sand and let\u2019s not worry that we\u2019re spending a trillion dollars on a program that is supposed to be for very low-income people.\u2019\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Maybe I&#8217;m just old fashioned, but I believe that people who are able to work and do not have small children should be required to work in order to receive government benefits. The rest of us are required to work to pay those benefits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On Wednesday, The Daily Caller posted an article about the impact of the Big Beautiful Bill on Medicaid. The article reports: Signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 4, the GOP\u2019s sweeping tax and spending package projects over &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=60213\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[853,18,1382,18287,18288,9732,7015],"class_list":["post-60213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-democrats","tag-healthcare","tag-medicaid","tag-nina-owcharenko-schaefer-director-of-the-center-for-health-and-welfare-policy-at-the-heritage-foundation","tag-provider-taxes","tag-senator-bernie-sanders","tag-the-daily-caller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60213"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60214,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60213\/revisions\/60214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}