Jake Tapper grills HHS Secretary Tom Price on whether President Trump broke his Medicaid promise

published 7 May 2017

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price spoke Sunday with CNN's Jake Tapper, who wanted to talk about this 2015 promise from President Trump:

"As you know, a lot of working-class voters went in there on Nov. 8 and pulled the lever for President Trump having heard him say that he was going to keep their Medicaid, save their Medicaid, without any cuts," Tapper said. Now, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the Republican health-care plan will decrease Medicaid spending by $880 billion over a decade. "How is that not a broken promise?" Tapper asked.

As he had earlier in the interview, Price denied that Medicaid is truly being cut, arguing that the CBO analysis is based on the ObamaCare baseline including Medicaid expansion. "The winners under ObamaCare were the federal government and insurance companies. The winners under the program that we provide, and that we believe is the most appropriate, are the patients and families and doctors," Price replied. "The reduction in spending that the Congressional Budget Office cites is, again, off the current law baseline. That means, if we did nothing at all, if we just continued this broken program for the next 10 years, how much money would the federal government spend?"

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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