Pallone says GOP’s new Medicaid plan would be ‘catastrophic’

Republicans on the House Energy & Commerce Committee released their long-awaited plan last night to reduce spending within the committee’s jurisdiction, including for the low-income health care program Medicaid – and Rep. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch), the committee’s top Democrat, is wasting no time in savaging it.

In a statement released late last night, Pallone said that Republicans’ proposal, which is set to come up for a marathon committee hearing tomorrow afternoon, would result in “catastrophic cuts” to health care programs that millions of Americans rely on.

“This is not trimming fat from around the edges, it’s cutting to the bone. The overwhelming majority of the savings in this bill will come from taking health care away from millions of Americans,” Pallone said. “Nowhere in the bill are they cutting ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ – they’re cutting people’s health care and using that money to give tax breaks to billionaires.”

“In no uncertain terms, millions of Americans will lose their health care coverage, hospitals will close, seniors will not be able to access the care they need, and premiums will rise for millions of people if this bill passes,” he continued.

Citing a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Pallone said that the GOP’s bill would increase the number of uninsured Americans by at least 8.6 million by 2034. That’s thanks to various Medicaid-related provisions creating work or community engagement requirements, mandating more frequent eligibility tests, and reducing federal funding for state-level Medicaid expansions, among others.

The CBO also estimated that the proposal would reduce the federal deficit by around $900 billion between this year and 2034, a key GOP priority.

The Energy & Commerce Committee, and Medicaid specifically, has been at the center of congressional policy debates since GOP House leaders directed the committee to cut at least $880 billion in spending as part of the party’s broader tax and spending-cut agenda. That directive drew widespread outrage from Democrats, who said most of the committee’s cuts would have to come out of Medicaid, and even got some alarmed pushback from Republicans, among them Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis).

The proposal that Energy & Commerce Republicans released last night does not cut as deeply into Medicaid as some had warned – or, in the case of deeply conservative Republicans, had hoped. Pallone’s immediate negative reaction, though, signals that Democrats are nonetheless unlikely to give Republicans any breathing room.

Pallone and other Democrats will get to air those grievances tomorrow, when the committee meets for a markup of the bill; also on the influential committee are two other New Jerseyans, Reps. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) and Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City).

Energy & Commerce isn’t the only major committee that’s set to meet on its portion of the GOP’s legislative agenda this week. The House Agriculture and Ways & Means Committees will also be meeting, and both of their briefs cover topics important to New Jerseyans: SNAP (or food stamps) on the former, the State and Local Tax deduction cap on the latter. (Kean and other pro-SALT Republicans are meeting with GOP leaders today to continue working on a deal on the deduction cap.)

Neither committee, however, will have any direct New Jersey input during their meetings; Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-Paterson)’s death last year left the Garden State without a representative on Ways & Means, while Agriculture hasn’t had a New Jerseyan since Van Drew switched parties and left the committee in 2019.