Sen. Ron Wyden sounds alarm on GOP plan to alter Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security

Oregon Senator Ron Wyden slammed House Speaker Mike Johnson after the latter said that the administration was looking to "fix" federal spending on programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Taking to X, Wyden said that Republicans had already cut $1 trillion from Medicaid, but that was not "enough" for them. "Republicans are coming for your Social Security and Medicare," he said. President Donald Trump had also previously mentioned that the government could not spend on such individual programs.

"The reason we are in trouble is that over 74% of federal spending is on autopilot. Mandatory spending. That's your entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and things like Social Security. They have to be adjusted and fixed. We have a plan to do that next year," Johnson said in an interview. A report by the Center for American Progress claims that the trillion-dollar cut to Medicaid was equal in size to tax benefits received by the nation's top 1%.

The cut was a part of President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA). The largest cuts to the program come from Medicaid work reporting requirements ($326 billion), limits on state provider tax arrangements ($191 billion), and restrictions on state-directed Medicaid payments ($149 billion). The bill also reduces taxes for the country's richest by more than $1 trillion over the next decade. Cuts to Medicaid could prove significant in the future as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) currently cover nearly 80 million low-income Americans.

Sen. Wyden was not the only Congress member who raised the alarm on the House Speaker's recent comments. Rep. Sean Castro shared similar concerns, which he made clear in a post on X. "Speaker Johnson made it clear what Republicans are targeting: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security," he wrote, claiming that ICE was going to receive $70 billion in funding.

Sen. Chuck Schumer claimed that the Republicans' giving tax breaks to the country's wealthy was one of the reasons why Social Security had seen "the worst drop in its long-term solvency in more than 30 years." Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand believes that the GOP would go ahead with this plan after the midterm elections. "The only thing that can stand in the way of Trump's destruction is a Democratic majority in the House and the Senate. November is coming. We can stop them," she said.

According to an NPR report, advocates for people with serious illnesses like HIV or cancer believe that strict Medicaid work rules put in place by the Trump administration could delay the treatment of such diseases. "It takes states literally months—usually years—to make the types of changes to their systems that they needed to make for this new rule," said Adrianna McIntyre, assistant professor of health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "They were severely constrained by the timeline, having a year and a half from the time the law was passed to implement all of this."