During a Wednesday appearance on "Alabama's Morning News with JT," U.S. Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Hoover) attempted to set the record straight when it comes to Medicaid cuts in President Donald Trump's so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, which passed the U.S. Senate on Tuesday and must know head back to the House.
Palmer told host JT Nysewander that the "Democrats flat-out lied" when painting the picture that Medicaid cuts would result in people losing their health care, noting that Medicaid would "grow by 20% over the next 10 years."
"Now, Senator Britt and I had a long discussion about this, and I talked with about a dozen members of the Senate the other night. I worked my butt off, JT, to try to fix Medicaid in this bill by taking some of the savings that we're going to get from reducing the enhanced matching expansion states and phasing down the provider tax to set up a fund where the governors of each state could fix their rural hospitals, could take care of their wait list, because there's over 710,000 people on wait list, over half of them are in-home care, and take care of the long-term disabled," Palmer outlined.
"And this would have been the best way to fix this. And Susan Collins, Senator Collins from Maine, agreed, of all people, JT, she was on board with this. And so, we've missed some opportunities," he added.
Palmer continued, "I think there is a fund, but it's not like I suggested. So, I'm going to try to work on this some more. But here's the thing. The Democrats just flat-out lied about what's going on. Medicaid's going to grow by 20% over the next 10 years. So, that's not a cut by any sense of the imagination."
The central Alabama Republican emphasized that nobody who was eligible to have health insurance would be losing their health insurance, although the able-bodied refusing to work and illegal aliens would, he advised.
"Plus, when they said that 7.8 million people are going to lose their insurance, 4.8 million of them are people who refuse to even take a part-time job or volunteer part-time, JT. That's the able-bodied adults," Palmer explained. "Guys sitting at home playing video games, drinking a cold beer that are covered by Medicaid."
He continued, "Another 1.64 million of them are illegal. They're not supposed to be on it to begin with. The other 1.6 [million], which this accounts for the entire 7.8 [million], are already eligible for insurance under the Obamacare exchanges. Nobody's going to lose their health insurance that are legally eligible to have health insurance."
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