President Donald Trump's Medicare and Medicaid administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz took to X on Tuesday to boast about the administration's rural hospital stabilization fund that they managed to get passed through Congress — but was swiftly reminded what a misleading exercise that was by a member of Congress.
"Health care in rural America is collapsing. Communities are losing their lifelines and being forced to drive for hours for care," wrote Oz, who previously headed up a controversial daytime talk show pushing untested dietary supplements. "Thanks to @POTUS and the One Big Beautiful Bill, we're able to change that with the Rural Health Transformation Program. With $50 billion, we're giving rural America a health system built for rural reality, not the afterthought of urban leftovers."
Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM) had a few choice words in response.
"I call BS," wrote Fernández, posting a bar graph that compared the $50 billion rural hospital fund to the $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts in that same bill. "You and your buddies cut healthcare by $1 trillion dollars. That’s like taking away someone's oxygen tank and offering them an inhaler."
Trump's tax megabill cut health care in several ways, including by imposing intensive red tape to disenroll certain non-disabled childless Medicaid beneficiaries who aren't working a certain number of hours a week, and by setting aggressive caps on the amount of matching federal funds states can get by taxing medical providers.
Some of the cuts are so draconian that even some Republicans who voted for the bill, chief among them Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), are pushing legislation to reverse some of the cuts.