A top House Republican on healthcare said he’s opposed to Medicaid cuts, although he believes the program has “a lot of inefficiencies” and could be optimized.
Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL), chairman of the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee, spoke with Politico at its Health Care Summit on Wednesday.
“I’m not for cuts in Medicaid,” Buchanan said before adding, “There are a lot of inefficiencies. We’ve got to find a way to … do things better for less.”
Buchanan is a senior House member who entered Congress in 2007. He reiterated after the summit that “Medicare and Medicaid cuts are off the table.”
“Instead, we’re focused on rooting out waste, fraud and abuse—because every dollar lost to inefficiency is a dollar not spent helping a single mom, a sick child or a senior in need,” he said on X. The Trump administration has looked high and low throughout the federal government for cuts via the Department of Government Efficiency.
While the department has been both lauded and criticized for its wide cuts, certain programs, such as Medicaid, are largely viewed as untouchable.
The prospect of making cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, or other senior programs such as Social Security has been highly controversial. Polls have indicated the programs remain highly popular, but Buchanan insists improvements can still be made.
“Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security — I’m for all that,” the Florida Republican said. “Our interest on the debt is a trillion dollars a year … We’ve got to find a way to [be] more efficient.”
Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO), the ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee’s Health Subcommittee, disagreed with Buchanan. “We just simply don’t have that much money,” she said.
She said she’s looked at other areas they could cut, but it wouldn’t be enough to fund Trump’s tax cuts. “We realized all the rest of the spending in the Energy and Commerce Committee, all the rest of it is $500 billion. So if you zeroed out everything else that we do, you’d still be $330 billion short,” DeGette said.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last week that he would not cut the senior programs. “We’re not gonna cut services. We’re not gonna cut Medicaid. We’re not gonna cut Medicare. We’re gonna provide services, but more efficiently,” he said on NewsNation.
Kennedy adviser Calley Means said the HHS Secretary “has taken over a department that has utterly failed.”
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“Any business in the world, if you went into it with the metrics that HHS has overseen with skyrocketing costs and has caused to skyrocket worse and worse outcomes, with extremely little innovation from industry on actual chronic disease reversal and prevention — just management — you would of course fire a bunch of people and you would, of course, install new leadership to put that mantle down,” Means said.
While Kennedy has been accused of cutting research funding, Means disagreed. “More money will be flowing to actual researchers, not university bureaucrats, not government bureaucrats — actual researchers. Not $1 of services has been cut,” he said.