Congressional Republicans have put the smooth functioning of the Children’s Health Insurance Program at risk by not renewing its funding in time for states to plan their budgets. But Donald Trump is taking the next step:
President Donald Trump's budget plans to cut the Children's Health Insurance Program by at least 20% over the next two fiscal years and slash Medicaid, which covers millions more children.
Millions of poor and working families could lose their health coverage if his proposed budget, released Tuesday and called "A New Foundation for American Greatness," gets through as-is. It would hit children's health care hard and break Trump's campaign promise to "save" Medicaid "without cuts."
Hey, we have a record number of kids with health coverage. What can we do about that? Don’t worry, budget director Mick Mulvaney has lots of ideas! And it seems that Trump has conveniently forgotten his repeated promise not to cut Medicaid:
"I can tell you exactly how it went down," Mulvaney said. "I went into the President with a list of proposed entitlement reforms.
"He went down the list, yes, yes, no, no, yes, no, yes, no, no," Mulvaney said. "The nos were all Social Security and Medicare. That is it. He said, 'I promised people on the campaign trail I would not touch their retirement and I would not touch Medicare, and we don't do it.' "
But disabled people? Screw 'em, just like the kids.
We could talk about the cruelty of leaving kids without health care and their parents scrambling and desperate to fill the gap. We could talk about how expensive it’s going to be in the long run to have a generation of kids who haven’t had preventive health care. But we’re talking here about Republicans. While Trump is unlikely to get all the cuts he’s asking for—because even congressional Republicans have some qualms about the kind of headlines they’d get for cutting CHIP by 20 percent over two years—this ensures that the discussion in Congress will start off with “how much are we cutting?” And once you set Republicans down that road, the damage to the country just keeps coming.