Price, Hatch contradict Mulvaney on Medicaid cuts

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) contradicted Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney Thursday on Medicaid cuts in President Trump’s budget proposal.

Hatch opened a Thursday hearing by saying that the president’s budget did not incorporate the House-passed American Health Care Act (AHCA) to repeal and replace Obamacare. As a result, he argued critics could not add up the roughly $600 billion in Medicaid cuts outlined in the budget to the roughly $800 billion cut in AHCA.

“It is not accurate to associate the specific Medicaid savings the [Congressional Budget Office] has estimated from enactment of the AHCA with the President’s budget. To do so would assume a level of specificity that, for obvious reasons, is just not there,” Hatch said.

{mosads}Price made the same argument in his testimony.

“… My understanding is the budget does not assume passage of the House bill,” he said.

But when the administration’s budget blueprint was first released, White House Budget Chief Mick Mulvaney told reporters—several times—that the budget did assume the passage of the House bill in its proposal. 

“We assume the Affordable Health Care Act that passed out of the House passes,” he said.

At the time, multiple media outlets confirmed that the Medicaid cuts in AHCA and the budget did not overlap, and reported their sum as the total cut.

In a subsequent budget hearing, Mulvaney affirmed that the AHCA and the budget should be looked at “as a unit in terms of dollars and allocations,” but changed the story on the Medicaid cuts. 

“You can’t add those two numbers together because there are components of those that overlap,” he said at a Senate Budget hearing. “It’s someplace between $800 [billion] and $1.4 trillion. So, if you wanted to round the difference off, what is that, $1.1 trillion?” he said.

In a House hearing, he said Medicaid would get $1.3 trillion less than the baseline.

An OMB official on Thursday said that the budget’s estimates were based roughly on the original AHCA score, but argued that it was “an ‘allowance’ rather than throughout the many accounts that might be affected, because the Budget does not presume the specific policies in the House bill.”

Rachel Roubein contributed to this report