Key health care program in line to get 'hammered' if Trump wins

Huffington Post's Jonathan Cohn has written a new piece of analysis showing that Medicaid appears in line to get "hammered" should former President Donald Trump win the 2024 presidential election.

Cohn notes that the former president has repeatedly claimed that he would not touch Social Security and Medicare, which leads Cohn to believe that he and his allies would target Medicaid, which mostly goes to low-income Americans.

"While it’s an open question whether they would be able to get major cuts all the way through Congress, the consequences would be substantial, for the federal budget and for the many millions of Americans who depend on the program," writes Cohn, who traces the GOP's obsession with axing Medicaid back decades.

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He notes that this obsession is still with the GOP, which has proposed new measures as recently as this year to gut Medicaid.

"This year’s official House Republican budget resolution, the most recently proposed budget from the House Republican Study Committee (which represents conservative Republicans) and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 all contain some version of a proposal to reduce or limit Medicaid spending significantly," he writes.

Cohn believes that the reason Trump and the GOP will target Medicaid is simple: They will need money to offset the costs of their massive proposed tax cuts.

"Making them permanent is likely to cost several trillion dollars, according to budget projections," Cohn argues. "And for a variety of reasons ― some having to do with the rules of the arcane budget process Republicans would likely need to use to get legislation through the Senate ― a GOP-led Congress would probably try to offset the costs of those tax cuts by also cutting something else. If Medicare, Social Security and defense funding are all off the table, Medicaid would be the obvious place to turn, given that it’s the next biggest spending item in the budget."