Marginal House Republicans voted for a budget resolution that instructed the House Committee on Energy and Commerce to cut spending under its jurisdiction by $880,000,000,000 over a decade. These members have said that this was not an instruction for cuts to Medicaid spending. Anyone who knows how to read a budget called BS.
The Congressional Budget Office lays out the programs that are under E&C jurisdiction with current law spending projections over a decade:
Dear Ranking Member Boyle and Ranking Member Pallone:
In response to your request, this letter provides information about projections of mandatory spending for the 2025–2034 period for the list of programs, excluding Medicare, that you indicated are under the jurisdiction of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. In CBO’s January 2025 baseline budget projections, mandatory outlays for the accounts you asked about total $8.8 trillion for the 2025–2034 period. Medicaid outlays account for $8.2 trillion, or 93 percent, of that amount (see Table 1).
You also asked for two subtotals of projected outlays
• Outlays other than for Medicaid total $581 billion through 2034.
• Outlays other than for Medicaid and CHIP total $381 billion over the 10‑year period.
If we assume that everything not MEDICAID has a 100% cut including the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program , that implies a $299 billion dollar cut to Medicaid.
Now let’s look at that pretty table 1:
Risk 
Risk Adjustment is revenue neutral as insurers pay into a different committee of jurisdiction the same amount of funds that E&C pays out. CHIPS is computer chip manufacturing subsidies.
Yeah, $880,000,000,000 is almost entirely going to be coming from health insurance for kids and Medicaid.
Baud
Kids want rich people to pay less in taxes. So it’s fair.
Doc Sardonic
Lot’s of people my age and a little younger better start preparing the kiddos for room sharing or clear out the man cave or office and get that guest space ready. Memaw and PawPaw are coming home, and they ain’t gonna have home healthcare assistance either.
Spanky
@Doc Sardonic: I’m gonna corner the market in bedpans!
StringOnAStick
So, how politically powerful are the nursing home corporations? Because this is extinction level cuts for them.
Jay
Invest in Funeral Homes, the ones that offer pauper services like a cardboard box coffin, crematorium sharing and ash dumping.
SpaceUnit
A leopard’s gotta eat.
Harrison Wesley
@StringOnAStick: Aren’t they increasingly being bought up by private equity?
Eolirin
@StringOnAStick: It’s really starting to look like no one has any political power besides Elon Musk.
The tariffs can’t be good for car dealerships, and they’re a major part of the Republican voter and donor bases. We’ve got HHS looking at getting rid of SSRIs and other widely prescribed medications, the kind of thing that would severely damage pharmaceutical profits.
Normally you’d expect some restraint around business interests, but absent the intensely corrupt self dealing by Musk, it doesn’t seem like anyone is having any effect in reining anything in.
Jay
@Eolirin:
DJTdiot has paused tariffs on autoparts and automakers for another 30 days.
Steve LaBonne
@Jay: I will definitely be cremated, and I always tell my wife I don’t care what she does with the ashes because I won’t be there.
Steve LaBonne
@Jay: Gotta keep manipulating the stonk market and profiting on the manipulation.
Jay
@Steve LaBonne:
You miss the brilliance of the plan. The dead have to be disposed of, no sky funerals. Either the Family, the Estate or the State pays for it.
Large sized Home Depot bulk cardboard box, $1.79,
Deceased in a fetal position, bones can be broken to make them fit,
Now you can fit 8 deceased on a burn rack that normally accommodates 1. 175% savings on fuel.
Ash and pulverized bone can be sold as filler for concrete applications.
The only cheaper and more profitable options are Soilient Green or Mrs. Lovett’s Meat Pies.
JaySinWA
CHIP = Childrens’ Health Insurance Program
CHIPS = CHIPS Act of 2022 (where CHIPS stands for the former “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors” for America Act
Not confusing at all /
ETA Like Google Messages, Samsung Messages, Facebook Messager. Not like Pota’to potato’ although at least the messaging apps are in the same general area of function.
gratuitous
Well, I’m sure that once the media get wind of this lesson in elementary mathematics, they’ll be all over House Republicans about how cruel their scheme is to the most vulnerable citizens.
Yes, nurse, I did slip my restraints again and posted utter madness on the internets.
Kosh III
Preaching to the choir: The R(regressive) Party has never cared about helping anyone but themselves. I’ve got mine, fork you.
Cheryl from Maryland
@Jay: My reaction is so what! If I were Canada and Mexico, I would be tired of being jerked around by an abusive partner.
ewrunning
@Eolirin: On the other hand, The Hill is reporting today that Senate Rethugs told President Musk at their meeting today that Congress needs to pass a recission package to make all of his mindless destruction of the Federal government legal. Senators Stinkball and Aquabuddha mentioned by name. Apparently Dunning-Kruger boy had to be educated about the whole recission process. Whole tone of the account of the meeting is nauseating, about Senators who’ve been complaining privately turning obsequious face to face, all afraid of his billions funding primaries against them. A recission package could get real interesting real fast as gop’ers start fighting over whose constituents get shafted.
Jay
@Cheryl from Maryland:
Canada is not pausing actions in regards to DJTdiot’s tariffs.
Mexico will announce Sunday.
All this means is DJTdiot’s not slapping a 25% tariff on Mexican and Canadian made cars and autoparts. Yet. US consumer costs are still going up on autos, because we are. The average parts that make up a car cross the US/Mexican, US /Canadian borders 8 times. That basic fleet Ford F150 just became $100,000 USD.
As an example, the CEO of Jack Daniels is bitching that pulling US Liquor off Canadian shelves is worse than a countervailing tariff, (duh) because Canadian consumers can’t even buy the product for 25% more.
Martin
@Jay: Generally tariffs aren’t imposed each time something crosses the border, rather they are packaged up and only tariffed once. That said, doing that requires work, likely by the folks getting mass fired, so who knows how it’ll actually work.
Jay
@Martin:
In Canada, everytime something under tariffs crosses the Canadian Border, tariffs are applied. Raw steel coming North, tariff, drop forged blank headed South, that’s up to DJTdiot, machined camshaft headed north, tariff, assembled engine headed south, that’s up to DJTdiot, Ford Mustang headed north, tariff.
MazeDancer
Nursing homes are filled with people who have dementia.
My mother was one until she died. I handled her bills. The private ones cost between 6 and 10K a month. The decent Medicaid ones have a 2 year waiting list.
It is impossible for someone who has a job to care for a person with dementia unassisted. It is pretty close to impossible with assistance.
There will be a lot of violence if people get kicked out of nursing homes.
Origuy
@Jay: Costco.com sells coffins and urns. Just sayin.
MagdaInBlack
@Jay: The collision repair MSO I work for is based in Winnipeg, MB and had shops in both the U.S. and Canada. I would just love to be a mouse in that Winnipeg corp office right now
eta: the corp clowns I know from corp here in Chicago lean pretty heavy MAGA.
Baud
@Origuy:
Who needs a pack of 10 though?
MagdaInBlack
@MazeDancer: My mother was too. Vascular dementia. She lived with me for 2 years until I could no longer do it. Medicaid paid for her in a pretty decent Catholic nursing home after that.
Geminid .
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is on the Energy snd Commerce Committee now. That’s a fsirly select posting.
Ohio Mom
@Steve LaBonne: I would like to donate my body to the medical school. After the anatomy class is finished, they cremate the bodies for free. Familiescan request the ashes or leave them behind — My cousins left my aunt’s ashes behind. My aunt would have approved, a woman after your own heart.
Raoul Paste
When you’re corrupt, there’s one thing you want, and it’s guaranteed government money. So if you’re able to slash Medicaid and Social Security, etc., sure the nursing homes and the pharmaceutical companies will be hurt, but that will free up money to go elsewhere, maybe to Musk’s company. There will be no deficit reduction, that’s for sure.
You’ve probably already seen Krugman’s latest Substack, titled America’s Trapped in a Burning Tesla
Ohio Mom
One thing I find weird is that the Ohio department of Developmental Disabilities just announced all sort of bells and whistles for the DD community in the coming year, as if over 60% of their budget doesn’t come through Medicaid. They are all Republicans, are they the hand that does not know what the other is doing?
Similarly, The Ohio Arc (a disability advocacy organization), is very happy about the new Ohio budget, they are the disability lobbyists and are proud of themselves. Again, Ohio only supplies around 40% of the budget, the rest comes from the Feds via Medicaid.
And I got an email from Children’s Hospital today announcing an April workshop on “Health Coverage Options for Kids with Special Needs” including
“Private Insurance, Medicaid, Managed Care, Health Insurance Marketplace Plans”
Like are they not aware that Medicaid and Marketplace Plans might cease to exist?
The disability community here (I can’t speak for anywhere else) has always had a bad case of “they wouldn’t do that to OUR kids” (as if disabled people are kids forever, no, they grow to be adults and are usually adults for a longer time than they were children).
I foresee a lot of very sated leopards.
Gloria DryGarden
@Baud: that family of 10-20 kids, when they all get measles, or bird flu, or Covid…
Eolirin
@Ohio Mom: I don’t think they have that much of a choice really. The disability community can’t really prepare for a loss of Medicaid dollars. It’s like trying to prepare for society collapsing.
No matter what bullshit survivalist fantasies you may have, if it happens, all supply chains and sanitation systems fail and I don’t care what your bunker looks like, you’re dying of dysentery or starvation sooner or later.
If medicaid fails, we suffer financial hardship and if our families aren’t rich enough we die. That’s it. There’s no plan B, no alternative backstop, the whole ecosystem of supports simply disappears. So I can understand why all of the organizations that provide those support are just going to treat it like it’s not going to happen until it does. They can’t do anything else.
Ohio Mom
@Eolirin: I did hear one Muckity-muck predict that only the ACA expansion would be cut, acknowledging with a shrug that would hurt direct support professionals (homemaker/personal care aides) whom our community depends on.
That makes sense in a way, that Obama care would be slashed, it would be part of Trump’s continuing revenge on Obama.
Eolirin
@Ohio Mom: Just gutting the ACA medicaid expansion would pull enough money out of the states that recieve it to trigger a nationwide recession. Those medicaid dollars pay salaries.
And it’ll bankrupt most of the remaining rural hospitals, taking out the only major employer in most of those communities.
Not that that’ll stop them.
rikyrah
@MazeDancer:
The largest percentage of Medicaid dollars go to people in Nursing Homes.