House Budget chair to push for Medicaid changes

House Budget Committee Chairwoman Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) says she hopes to get changes in Medicaid payments into next year’s budget. 

“I intend to push for a change in the Medicaid reimbursement rate in our upcoming budget resolution to ensure that Medicaid dollars are used to properly support our most vulnerable citizens,” Black wrote in a RealClearPolitics op-ed Monday.

Black said Medicaid has a “faulty foundation,” claiming that states receive more federal dollars “to cover able-bodied adults above the poverty line who are on Medicaid than they do to support children and the disabled who are well below the poverty line. That’s wrong.”

In fiscal 2016, Medicaid cost $553.5 billion, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

{mosads}But Medicaid may not be the only entitlement program on the chopping block in the House budget resolution.

On Friday, Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said the resolution would include reforms to Medicare despite President Trump’s campaign promise that he wouldn’t cut the program.

“I’m pretty sure that the Budget Committee in the House will advance that through the House Republican budget that we will pass,” Ryan said in a radio interview with WIBA. 

“The question is can we get everybody else to agree, and that’s just an ongoing conversation we’re having.”

House Republicans are also mulling cuts to “means-tested” mandatory spending — welfare programs — as they look to slash spending.

The Government Accountability Office said earlier in the month that the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal path and noted that most of the annual spending is concentrated in mandatory spending programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.