Top Trump health official slams Democrats for 'misleading' claims about Medicaid reform

FIRST ON FOX: A apical Trump White House authoritative is looking to undercut Senate Democrats’ talking points connected Medicaid, arguing that the GOP’s program to betterment the healthcare programme would payment agrarian hospitals, not harm them.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz told Fox News Digital that "special interests are pushing misleading talking points to effort and halt the astir ambitious healthcare reforms ever."

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Newly sworn-in Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz speaks during a ceremonial successful the Oval Office astatine the White House connected April 18, 2025, successful Washington. (Andrew Harnik)

Oz’s sentiment comes arsenic Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and Senate Republicans sprint to decorativeness their enactment connected President Donald Trump’s "big, beauteous bill" up of a self-imposed July 4 deadline.

Part of the measure from the Senate Finance Committee aims to marque bully connected the GOP’s committedness to basal retired waste, fraud and maltreatment wrong the wide utilized healthcare programme by including enactment requirements and booting amerciable immigrants from payment rolls, among different measures.

Tweaks to the Medicaid supplier taxation complaint person ruffled feathers connected some sides of the aisle. Indeed, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., sent a missive to Trump and the apical legislature Republicans past week informing that changes to the Medicaid supplier taxation complaint would harm implicit 300 agrarian hospitals.

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., astatine the US Capitol successful Washington connected June 3, 2025.  (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

And a cohort of Senate Republicans were furious with the alteration aft the measure dropped past week.

But Oz contended that "only 5%" of inpatient Medicaid spending happens successful agrarian communities, and that the mammoth measure "instead targets abuses overwhelmingly utilized by ample hospitals with well-connected lobbyists."

"We are committed to preserving and improving entree to attraction successful agrarian communities with a transformative attack that bolsters precocious technology, invests successful infrastructure, and supports workforce — alternatively than propping up a strategy that mostly benefits wealthier municipality areas," Oz said.

Schumer’s missive included information from a survey precocious conducted by the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research astatine the University of North Carolina astatine his behest. He warned that if the measure is passed arsenic is, millions of radical would beryllium kicked disconnected of their healthcare coverage, and "rural hospitals volition not get paid for the services they are required by instrumentality to supply to patients."

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Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Bill' was sent to the Senate aft the House voted to walk the bill.  (AP; Getty; Fox News Digital)

Fox News Digital reached retired to Schumer, Wyden and Merkley for comment.

However, different study from the Trump-aligned Paragon Health Institute argued likewise to Oz that peculiar involvement groups and healthcare lobbyists were "flooding the airwaves with claims" that Republicans’ changes to Medicaid would shutter agrarian hospitals.

For example, they argued that a caller study from the Center for American Progress warned that implicit 200 agrarian hospitals would beryllium astatine hazard of closure, but that the findings were based connected changes to the national aesculapian assistance percentage, oregon the magnitude of Medicaid costs paid for by the national government.

Changes to that percent were mulled by legislature Republicans but were not included successful the "big, beauteous bill."  

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Still, the changes to the Medicaid supplier taxation rate, which were a stark departure from the House GOP’s mentation of the bill, angered the Republicans who person warned not to marque revisions to the healthcare programme that could unopen down agrarian hospitals and footwear moving Americans from their benefits.

The Senate Finance Committee went further than the House’s frost of the supplier taxation rate, oregon the magnitude that authorities Medicaid programs wage to healthcare providers connected behalf of Medicaid beneficiaries, for non-Affordable Care Act enlargement states, and included a proviso that lowers the complaint successful enlargement states annually until it hits 3.5%.

However, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, is moving connected a imaginable alteration to the measure that would make a supplier alleviation money that could sate her and different Republicans’ concerns astir the alteration to the supplier taxation rate.