38 House Republicans Vote for Massive Medicare Cuts for Second Time in Two Months
April 16, 2021
Republicans are not to be trusted to protect the Medicare system (Molly Adams)
By Josh Israel
The American Independent Foundation
Thirty-eight Republicans voted Tuesday against a bipartisan bill to stop massive cuts to the federal Medicare program.
The legislation ultimately passed by a margin of 384-38.
The same language passed easily in the Senate on March 25, by a 90-2 vote. The bill now goes to President Joe Biden for his signature.
The legislation was necessary because the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan — enacted without a single Republican vote — relied on deficit spending.
Under the 2010 Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act, that relief package automatically triggered cuts to Medicare, farm subsidies, and other programs. According to an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, this would have resulted in $36 billion in Medicare reductions and tens of billions in cuts to other things.
Tuesday’s legislation will prevent those automatic Medicare cuts for this year, but extend the deficit reduction provisions by an extra year — leaving them in place until the 2031 budget.
On March 19, the House passed a bill by Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth, to prevent all of the automatic budget cuts triggered by the law. It was opposed by 175 Republicans.
When the bill arrived in the Senate, Democrat Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Republican Susan Collins of Maine successfully substituted their narrower proposal to exempt only the Medicare cuts scheduled for this year. It received wide bipartisan support.
But because the language changed, the House had to vote to accept that language — a process delayed by the chamber’s April recess.
House Republicans used the specter of automatic cuts to Medicare as a major reason to oppose the $1.9 trillion relief package.
“The American people deserve better than Biden and Pelosi’s political payoff scheme,” Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted on March 11. “It causes $36 billion in cuts to Medicare.”
But rather than fix it, the GOP lawmakers on Tuesday voted to let the cuts happen.
Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), who backed the bill, called the legislation a “wiser course of action than that which my House Democrat colleagues pursued just a few weeks ago.”
Yarmuth also backed the compromise on Tuesday and said he was committed to backing a second fix to prevent future cuts before the end of this Congress.
No member spoke in opposition prior to the vote, but Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said in a statement that he voted to allow the cuts because the bill “fails to address the financial needs of our country now, in real time [… and] allows Medicare to circumvent the rules to add on to an already unbalanced budget.”
Josh Israel is former senior investigative reporter at ThinkProgress and former head of money-in-politics reporting at the Center for Public Integrity. Follow him on Twitter @jeisrael
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