The Trump administration has released its budget for fiscal year 2019, and it's turning out to be quite the gift for Democrats in 2018. A president's budget is rarely the actual blueprint for the budgets that result. It's the president's wish-list, how he would allocate resources if it were only up to him. With Trump, it's utterly predictable. Lots of money for big shiny things that go "boom," lots of pain and humiliation for actual people. That includes, rather stupidly, going after Medicare.
The document says that the budget will propose cutting spending on Medicare, the health program for the elderly and disabled, by $237 billion but doesn’t specify other mandatory programs that would face reductions, a category that also includes Social Security, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare and agricultural subsidies.
The Medicare cut wouldn’t affect the program's coverage or benefits, according to the document. The budget will also call for annual 2 percent cuts to non-defense domestic spending beginning "after 2019."
You can't really cut $237 billion out of a program—in one year—without doing so much damage to coverage and benefits. What's more, it would cut $554 billion over the next 10 years. Included are reductions in payments to providers and facilities, like rehabilitation centers and hospitals. Even if benefits aren't cut, patients will lose access to providers who will drop out of the program because their reimbursements are shrinking.
That's the tip of the healthcare iceberg in the budget proposal. It also includes, of course, repealing the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with blockgrants, and capping Medicaid spending as well to reduce total healthcare spending by $675 billion over a decade. Because they really, really don't want people to have health care.
But explicitly going after Medicare? In an election year where Republicans are already running scared? You do that, Trumpsters.