Democrats Disguise Medicare/Medicaid Spending Increases, Then Attack GOP for 'Cuts' to Rollbacks
Source: Christopher Jacobs. "Dems Spin Medicare Spending Spree Into Story About GOP 'Cuts'." August 24, 2026. thefederalist.com
The Gist
The author argues that Democrats have quietly let Medicare and Medicaid spending balloon far beyond what was originally projected—sometimes through legislation, sometimes through executive regulations—and the media never reported on it. Now, when Republicans try to walk back some of this unexpected spending, Democrats and journalists falsely spin it as heartless 'cuts' to these programs, when it's really just correcting for spending nobody actually voted for or knew about.
Conclusion
Democrats and their media allies engage in a pattern of stealthily inflating government health spending (via legislation or unilateral regulation) and then falsely characterizing Republican attempts to scale back or repeal these unanticipated increases as 'cuts' to Medicare and Medicaid.
Premises
- CBO drastically underestimated the cost of the IRA's drug pricing provisions, originally projecting $129 billion in deficit reduction but now projecting the same provisions will increase deficits over the same period.
- CBO has repeatedly revised Part D spending estimates upward substantially (by $500 billion in November, then $700 billion in February) due to the IRA's effects.
- The Medicare trustees report raised long-term Part D costs by $5 trillion (about one-third) largely due to IRA changes that lawmakers did not anticipate when voting for the law.
- A similar pattern occurred with Medicaid under the Biden administration, where CBO increased spending projections by $817 billion between June 2024 and January 2025, driven mostly by unilateral executive/regulatory actions rather than congressional votes.
- These massive spending increases—whether from the IRA or Biden-era Medicaid rules—received little to no media coverage.
- Despite this unreported spending explosion, when Republicans attempt to scale back these unanticipated increases, they are attacked in the press as making 'cuts' to Medicare/Medicaid.
- Even after GOP reconciliation bill policy changes, CBO's Medicaid spending projections remain higher than they were before Biden's regulatory actions, undermining the 'cuts' narrative.
Assumptions
- The media's failure to report on spending increases reflects ideological bias or complicity rather than neutral judgments about newsworthiness.
- Scaling back an unanticipated or unauthorized spending increase constitutes a return to baseline rather than a genuine 'cut' in any meaningful sense.
- CBO's revised estimates are reliable indicators of the 'true' cost of these programs, despite CBO's own admission of significant past estimation errors.
- Congress's original vote reflected an implicit contract based on projected costs, such that higher-than-expected costs delegitimize the spending as something 'lawmakers didn't know about.'
- Republican proposals to repeal or roll back these provisions are motivated primarily by fiscal responsibility rather than other policy goals (e.g., opposition to drug price negotiation itself).
- The comparison between original CBO projections and later revised projections is the correct baseline for characterizing subsequent GOP legislative changes as 'cuts' or not.