Trump's Medicaid assault: Now he's gutting a social program he promised to protect

[DonViejo]

THURSDAY, MAR 16, 2017 07:59 AM EDT

Trump’s Medicaid assault: Now he’s gutting a social program he promised to protect

The White House plans to slash Medicaid funding and kick people off the program — that's not how Trump campaigned

SIMON MALOY

For a long time now, Donald Trump has broadcast to the world that he is different from other Republicans when it comes to the social safety net. While most Republican candidates in the 2016 presidential race hugged the party orthodoxy that called for cuts to and restructuring of social programs, Trump positioned himself as a champion of entitlements.

“I was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid,” Trump tweeted a couple of months before entering the 2016 race. “The Republicans who want to cut [Social Security] & Medicaid are wrong,” he tweeted in 2015. After joining the race, Trump was similarly outspoken in his defense of government protections for the poor and the sick.

Throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump defended the idea of using government resources to provide low-income people with health care, insisting that he didn’t want to see anyone “dying in the middle of the street.” When asked how he would go about providing that assistance, Trump pointed to Medicaid. “We have to go and help them through the Medicaid system,” Trump said in September, when asked how he would provide coverage to people who can’t afford private insurance. “A lot of people said, ‘Oh, gee, that’s not the thing to say.’ I said, ‘Well you know what? If I can’t say that, I’m not running for office.’”

The casual observer might walk away from all these statements believing that Trump supports Medicaid and has no intention to do any damage to the program. But at the same time that Trump was campaigning as a Medicaid supporter, he was also pushing to fund the program through block grants, which would slash its finances and force people off the rolls. As president, Trump has continued this war on Medicaid.

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http://www.salon.com/2017/03/16/trumps-medicaid-assault-now-hes-gutting-a-social-program-he-swore-hed-protect/

[Eyeball_Kid]

1. Trumpy is in a pickle. Poor boy...

If he vows to keep his campaign promises regarding Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare, then he runs the risk of gaining opposition from the Congressional GOPers. If he starts messing with the GOP coalition, he also runs the risk of seeing some Congressional GOPers slip away and join Democrats to demand more aggressive investigations into his Russia ties and his lawbreaking. That's why he's committed to signing whatever the GOP Congress wants him to sign. He's abandoned his Fanboy base and is totally committed to appeasing the hard right as his protection against scrutiny.

Since Trumpy has no core values, it's simply a matter of survival for him-- HIS survival.

[dalton99a]

2. To Trump more power means more opportunities for personal sadistic cruelty

[Freethinker65]

3. When he said "protect" he really meant....

[dalton99a]

4. In Trumpspeak, the reverse is the actual truth.

[Solly Mack]

5. K&R

[hollowdweller]

6. basically everything so far seems to hurt people who voted for him.