When It Comes to Cutting Medicaid, Democrats Only Have Themselves to Blame

In 1964, Ronald Reagan rightly pointed out that 'government programs, once launched, never disappear.' He was, in this and in many things, correct.

I'm hard-pressed to think of a single government program that has ended because it either a) accomplished its goals or b) its mission was better served by the private sector. The government has no incentive to end such programs. Quite the contrary, they have every reason in the world to continue them.

DOGE demonstrated the massive amounts of waste and fraud in government programs. That money, of course, didn't just vanish. It went somewhere -- probably in the pockets of politicians, unions, or the bigwigs at NGOs. Just the other day, I told you about Gavin Newsom getting some of the $100 million meant to go to L.A. wildfire victims.

But I digress. The point is this: government programs rarely go away, not when there's money to be had.

And especially not when the media and the Left (but I repeat myself) can use it as a cudgel against President Trump when those programs do go away.

Nearly one million Americans have been removed from a health care plan in New York over the last two years, according to data from KFF, a nonprofit health policy research and news organization.
Between March 2023 and March 2025, around 930,000 people in New York were disenrolled from the Medicaid program as part of the unwinding process happening nationwide in the wake of the COVID pandemic.
When approached for comment, New York State Health Commissioner Dr. James McDonald told Newsweek in a statement: 'The passage of the Congressional Budget Reconciliation Bill poses a serious threat to the health and well-being of New Yorkers.'
'A rollback of this magnitude jeopardizes the stability of health care facilities around the state, strips health insurance coverage from New Yorkers, and will have direct, harmful impacts on working families, children, older adults, and individuals with disabilities.'

Knowing full well that most people don't read past the headline, Newsweek chose to spin cuts to New York's Medicaid program as a result of the Big Beautiful Bill (BBB).

In the opening paragraphs, they admit the cuts came from March 2023 to March 2025 -- a full two years before President Trump was inaugurated, three months before the BBB was signed into law, and several months more before the provisions of the BBB go into full effect.

Perhaps State Health Commissioner McDonald needs a new calendar in his office.

Or perhaps he should check out what's going on in Albany, where 41 of the state's 63 senate seats and 103 of the assembly seats are occupied by ... drumroll please ... Democrats. He could also be reminded that Joe Biden was the president from March 2023 until January 2025.

But why let facts get in the way of a good narrative?

If you dig even deeper into the article, you'll also come across this little tidbit:

Some states expanded access to Medicaid, the federal health program for those with limited income and resources, during the COVID pandemic under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
It was only in March 2023 that states were allowed to start 'unwinding' the expanded enrollment, as previously, federal rules had determined that states had to keep Medicaid recipients on the program, regardless of changes to eligibility.

In a September 18, 2022, interview on '60 Minutes,' President Joe Biden declared the pandemic over: 'The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over.'

Now, I could chalk this up to the fact that Joe Biden was cognitively unwell even then, and his advisors would've preferred to make the pandemic last in perpetuity. It is, after all, 2025, and some Leftists are still arguing that not wearing masks is genociding minorities.

But Biden was the president, and he claimed the pandemic was over, so COVID-era rules concerning Medicaid enrollment should've ended the next day.

Instead, people in New York got another two and a half years of 'free' healthcare on the taxpayers' dime.

Must be nice.

And this doesn't even begin to touch the fact that the BBB is designed to remove illegal immigrants from Medicaid/Medicare rolls. The Left insisted throughout the fight over the BBB that illegal immigrants didn't qualify for Medicaid, so we didn't need to remove them from the program.

That was a lie, too, of course. The Chicago Tribune admitted that illegal immigrants in Illinois were receiving Medicaid benefits. Here's what they wrote (emphasis added):

For nearly 20 years, Maria would call her sister — a nurse in Mexico — for advice on how to manage her asthma and control her husband’s diabetes instead of going to the doctor in California.
She didn’t have legal status, so she couldn’t get health insurance and skipped routine exams, relying instead on home remedies and, at times, getting inhalers from Mexico. She insisted on using only her first name for fear of deportation.
Things changed for Maria and many others in recent years when a handful of Democrat-led states opened up their health insurance programs to low-income immigrants regardless of their legal status. Maria and her husband signed up the day the program began last year.
...
At least seven states and the District of Columbia have offered coverage for immigrants since mostly 2020. But three of them have done an about-face, ending or limiting coverage for hundreds of thousands of immigrants who aren’t in the U.S. legally in California, Illinois and Minnesota.

I have to wonder about the 'legal status' of the 930,000 people in New York who lost health insurance. I'm going to guess they're not actual citizens.

Once again, this is a problem of the Democratic Party's making. They were the ones who decided to give illegal immigrants Medicare, despite laws to the contrary and budget shortfalls (thanks largely to the Dems' wasteful spending on everything else). They were the ones who tried to make COVID-related spending permanent despite the pandemic ending almost three years ago. They were the ones who became so radical and unhinged that their party's approval rating is at 19%.

So, while Newsweek can try to blame this on the BBB, here's the truth: Democrats took healthcare away from millions.

Millions who shouldn't have had it in the first place.

Dems have no one to blame for this but themselves.