Oz to pitch GOP senators on need for Medicaid changes

Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, is scheduled to speak to Republican senators at lunch Tuesday on the need to reform Medicaid, according to a GOP source familiar with the schedule.
Oz is expected to speak in detail about the need to protect the program for low-income families, the elderly and the disabled, and what the administration views as current abuses of the program, such as people in the country without authorization receiving Medicaid benefits.
Oz will address GOP lawmakers a day after the Senate Finance Committee unveiled proposed changes to Medicaid that would go beyond the spending cuts to the program passed by the House last month.
The Senate legislation would cap health care provider taxes at 3.5 percent in 2031, limiting a popular strategy used by many states to draw more federal Medicaid funding. The cap, which would apply to states that expanded Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act, would be phased in starting in 2027.
All states except for Alaska finance part of their share of Medicaid funding through health care provider taxes, and 39 states have three or more such taxes in place, according to KFF, a health policy research group.
Fiscal conservatives such as Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) have called for Medicaid to be retrenched to cover the vulnerable groups for which it was originally intended when enacted in 1965.
Scott notes that President Trump's Council of Economic Advisers found that Medicaid spent $56.1 billion on able-bodied adults in 2024, including $13.5 billion in California and $6.4 billion in New York.
'We HAVE to stop letting blue states game the system to give away free health care to illegal aliens and people who don't want to work — it's taking away resources from our most vulnerable populations who rely on this program as a safety net,' Scott posted on X Tuesday.
But critics of the changes to the program passed by the House and drafted by the Senate Finance Committee warn that cuts to federal funding will hurt rural hospitals.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) slammed the bill for slowing down the phaseout of subsidies for renewable energy while cutting more from Medicaid compared to the House-passed bill.
'It sounds like to me like we're going to keep the Biden 'green new deal' subsidies and we're going to pay for that by defunding rural hospitals. That's going to be hard argument to make in Missouri,' he told reporters.
He said the language in the bill to require some people on Medicaid to pay higher co-pays is 'not good.'
'It sounds like to me like this needs some work,' he said.

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