By skyforbes 
Thinking Citizen Blog: Thursday is Health, Health Care, and Global Health Policy Day
Today’s Topic: Medicaid under Trump: what should every thinking citizen know?
Are proposed cuts in Medicaid a frontal assault on our most vulnerable populations?
Is Medicaid full of waste, fraud, and abuse? Does it undermine personal responsibility?
What is the most important question to ask? What is the best answer you have come up with? How much can a thinking citizen be expected to know about a program so large and complex? What is the best article you have ever read on the subject? What are the three most important charts worth analyzing?
Today, three charts plus nine somewhat random facts. What are the most important things you know about Medicaid that the rest of us might well not but would benefit from learning?
Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
MORE THAN HALF OF ADULTS SAY THEY OR A FAMILY MEMBER HAVE EVER BEEN COVERED BY MEDICAID — WOW!!!
1. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) was founded in 1965.
2. The head of it today is Dr. Mehmet Oz who served as co-chair of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition during the first Trump Adminisration. He is a physician, author, and media personality. A graduate of Harvard College (BA), and the University of Pennsylvania (MD, MBA). He is also a veteran of the Turkish armed forces.
3. CMS falls under the Department of Health and Human Services, headed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., most famous as an anti-vaccine activist.
MEDICAID FINANCES ON THIRD OF ALL NURSING HOME CARE SPENDING IN THE UNITED STATES!
1. The House version of the Trump bill which passed 215–214 on May 22nd included cuts of more than $800 billion over the next 10 years that could leave 7 million Americans “without Medicaid.”
2. The Senate version “would extend new work requirements passed by the House to adults with older children and impose a lower tax-rate cap for Medicaid providers, which would limit matching funds receive for Medicaid from the federal government.”
3.It would also “implement additional eligibility and enrollment rules, including new address verification standards, provider screening requirement and penalties for states that offer Affordable Care Act coverage to undocumented migrants by reducing their Medicaid spending.”
IS WELFARE DEPENDENCY A PROBLEM? IF SO, WHAT SHOULD BE DONE ABOUT IT?
1. The House bill also “calls for a prohibition on funding for gender transition procedures for both adults and minors under the federal Medicaid program and the state Children’s Health Insurance Program.”
2. In the latest reported fiscal year (2023), federal Medicaid spending was $614 billion.
3. That same year, state Medicaid spending was $280 billion. Total state and federal: $894 billion.
NB: What is the best estimate you have seen on local Medicaid spending?
FINAL QUESTIONS
What is the net present value of the unfunded Medicaid liability? $10 trillion? $100 trillion? who cares? who should?
Trump Promises ‘NO CUTS’ To Medicaid — But Estimates Still Say Bill Could Impact 7 Million Americans
https://www.vera.org/news/trumps-medicaid-cuts-would-be-a-disaster-for-crime-and-safety
Medicaid Financing: The Basics | KFF
https://www.mercatus.org/economic-insights/expert-commentary/americas-crushing-fiscal-gap
17 Nobel Laureates and 1200+ Economists Agree with Ben Carson re U.S. Fiscal Gap
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
NB: Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
YOUR TURN
Please share the most interesting thing you learned in the last week related to health, health care or health care policy — the ethics, economics, politics, history….
Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to health are or health care policy that the rest of us may have missed.
Or just some random health-related fact that blew you away.
This is your chance to make someone’s day. Or to cement in your mind something really important you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than you otherwise would about something that matters.