Republicans will do anything to reduce Medicaid spending
Kery Murakami 23 [Murakami is a senior reporter covering Congress and federal agencies, 3/27/23, “Republicans in Congress want to reduce federal spending on Medicaid, arguing it has grown too much,” https://www.route-fifty.com/health-human-services/2023/03/more-republican-states-consider-expanding-medicaid-gop-house-proposes-gutting-it/384495/] //mh
President Joe Biden in his budget request to Congress is calling for increasing federal spending on Medicaid by providing coverage to the millions in the 10 states that have not expanded the health care program to more people under the Affordable Care Act.
But illustrating the wide divisions between Democrats and Republicans over the future of Medicaid, Republicans in Congress are proposing to reduce spending on Medicaid, arguing it has grown too much. According to the conservative Heritage Foundation, the program has nearly doubled—from $401.5 billion to $709 billion—since President Barack Obama signed the ACA into in 2010.
“Medicaid has been one of the fastest growing programs,” said Richard Stern, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget. “So it has been very important to conservatives to bring costs down by improving the efficiency of the program.”
To that end, many Republicans are supporting a proposal by the Republican Study Committee, a group that includes about three-fourths of House Republicans, that could reduce federal spending by $3.64 trillion, or roughly by half over the next decade, partly by shifting more of the cost of running Medicaid to states.