Will Reforming Medicaid Kill People?

losol via Foter.com / CC BY-ND

These days, it's not just President Donald Trump's ill-advised tweets and jabs—not to mention the latest revelations about Trump Jr.'s hobnobbing with Russia during the election—that have become a distraction from serious policy discussions. The liberal habit of trotting out shrill bromides to discredit opposing points of views is making rational debate increasingly impossible too. A case in point is the left's doubling down on the accusation that the GOP's plan to reform Medicaid as part of its Obamacare repeal-and-replace bill—a very imperfect effort that likely deserves to be relegated to the dustbin of history, as Peter Suderman has argued—will result in mass deaths.

If Senate Republicans' plan is enacted—a big "if" at this stage—federal Medicaid spending would drop from $4.6 trillion between 2018 and 2026 to about $3.9 trillion.

This reduction is hardly draconian. Given that liberals want health care spending to go in only one direction—up—it's hardly surprising that they'd fight this. But how they do so matters. And their claim that the cuts will kill Americans—about 208,500 over the next decade, per a Vox analysis—is pure sensationalism.

Go here to read my piece on the subject.

#Medicaid #Obamacare