How do you tell if a politician is lying? He sends an email. Trent Kelly just sent me a whopper. In it, he claims the One Big Beautiful Bill is “A Big Win for Mississippi.” He writes that the bill puts Americans first. Well, I suppose that really rich guys are Americans, and the Roberts’ Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are people, so I suppose they are Americans, too. The rest of us? Not so much.
He first claims to be protecting Medicaid. This will be accomplished by requiring all Medicare recipients to complete forms proving their employment every six months. Given that this administration has cut the people who answer questions at Social Security, IRS, and elsewhere, applicants will be on their own. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that 7.8 million people will lose their coverage as a result of this red tape. They also indicate that the number of fraudulent claims by recipients is less than 100,000 a year – fewer than one per thousand cases. Most “fraud and waste” comes from crooked health care providers. He does not even mention that the bill cuts $863 billion paid to the states for Medicaid coverage.
Then, he writes that the bill expands access to “home and community-based care” for seniors. This is a sneaky way of saying that the lack of Medicaid will crush our nursing homes, as they largely depend on Medicaid for payment. He does not mention that the bill scales back home and community-based service waivers (Section 1915(c) of the Social Security Act), which allows states to provide Medicaid services in home and community settings as an alternative to institutional care.
His “real financial relief” is a $6,000 temporary additional deduction for seniors working for less than $75,000 a year. For most seniors who live primarily on social security, we pay no taxes on our benefits already. In fact, the “biggest tax cut in our history” will barely be noticed by anyone making less than $50,000 per year, which is nearly half of everybody in Mississippi.
He mentions the Rural Transformation Program. This will budget $10 billion per year over 10 years to help states develop and implement plans for transforming rural health care systems. I think that very little of that $10 billion will actually help local hospitals that will be devastated by the loss of Medicaid.
One win for Mississippi did happen. The bill establishes a moratorium on increasing taxes on health care providers, which is how states gain the revenue to cover the state’s share of Medicaid payments. Since Mississippi did not expand Medicaid, we will not be in as deep a financial hole as other states that did. Thanks, Trent.
Bill Gillmore
Columbus
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