May 29, 2025 Editor, The News-Gazette: It would be hard to not have heard of the recent budget bill passed by the House of Representatives.
It has been widely reported that in order to fund over $4 trillion in tax cuts that will mostly benefit wealthy individuals and corporations, significant amounts of money are to be cut from Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps) benefits.
Many folks in Southwest Virginia depend on these programs in order to get by. Of course, the Republicans in the House delayed these changes until after the midterm elections, hoping that cutting programs that are popular with their constituents would not cost them a seat in the mid-term election. Despite all the concerns about the current budget deficit, the Republicans basically voted to add over $2 trillion to the current deficit.
The current talking point made by Republicans is that they are only cutting waste and fraud from the Medicaid program. There is certainly significant Medicaid fraud, but the reality is that fraud committed by Medicaid recipients is a drop in the bucket compared to fraud committed by medical providers and practices. Most of this fraud consists of billing Medicaid for services or treatments that were not provided, or billing for more expensive treatments than those actually used. A quick look at the federal cases of Medicaid fraud for 2024 (https://www.justice. gov/criminal/criminal-fraud/ health-care-fraud-unit/2024national-hcf-case-summaries) totaled $515 million, and all of these cases were against providers. There is not a single case against recipients.
And that was just the cases that specified Medicaid. The total of false billings to federal programs for various health care fraud schemes in 2024 was $2.75 billion. Yet in order to fund those tax cuts, Republicans are not doing anything to stop the real fraud, but are hurting the people who rely on Medicaid for their health care. PATRICIA HIGGINS Lexington
