Medicaid Reform Quotes

While the Left seems obsessed with increasing taxes and spending even more money, conservatives have focused more heavily on the need for spending restraint and entitlement reform - primarily to preserve and protect the future of the Medicare program. Overlooked in all of this is the future of Medicaid.

It's not health care reform to dump more money into Medicaid.

A major part of the conservative plans to reform Medicaid turn on the assumption that states will be better able to manage the program, and deliver its benefits, free from all the intrusive regulation that Washington imposes.

Expanding Medicaid without fixing Medicaid is a terrible idea.

You put me in charge of Medicaid, the first thing I'd do is get [female recipients] Norplant, birth-control implants, or tubal ligations. Then, we'll test recipients for drugs and alcohol, and if you want to [reproduce] or use drugs or alcohol, then get a job.

Under President Obama's new health care law, Medicaid will become a very different health coverage program than first envisioned.

One of the challenges in the Affordable Care Act was that it prejudiced the Medicaid system very much in favor of able-bodied adults, away from the more traditional Medicaid populations of the aged, the disabled, pregnant women, and children.

We're going to be aggressive on Wall Street and in Albany and on Medicaid fraud.

I'm the guy that has written at great length about exactly how we should profoundly reform Social Security. If I were afraid of going after entitlements, I wouldn't have done that, I wouldn't have put Medicaid reform in this budget, I wouldn't have called for the reductions in spending, which people will scream about, but I think are necessary.

Advocacy groups like Families U.S.A. imagine that once Medicaid becomes a middle-class entitlement, political pressure from middle-class workers will force politicians to address these problems by funneling more taxpayer dollars into this flawed program. President Barack Obama's health plan follows this logic.

I support the Ryan budget plan. I think it’s the right direction on the major points. I can’t say I’ve read all of it, but on the major thrust of what he’s doing, I support what he wants to do with Medicare, Medicaid. The only thing I would do, frankly, as I’ve said publicly many times, I think we should implement a lot of these things sooner than what he’s suggesting.

The bottom line is, what are we doing to Obamacare? We eviscerate the law in our bill, and then we do things like expanding health savings accounts, which give families real flexibility. We reform Medicaid.

Medicaid and Medicare both need to be devolved to the states.

Unfortunately, the (budget) does not . . . help Congress reform such programs as Medicaid and Medicare, which both grow at average rate of around 8 percent each year through 2015 and will continue to eat up more of the total federal budget.

What I support is moving Medicaid to block grants so that the states can drive that process.

One option is to run Medicaid like a health program - rather than an exercise in political morals - and let states tailor benefits to the individual needs of patients, even if that means abandoning the unworkable myth of 'comprehensive' coverage.

Progressives should be willing to talk about ways to ensure the long-term viability of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, but those conversations should not be part of a plan to avert the fiscal cliff.

I don't think anybody should be expanding Medicaid. I think it's a mistake to create new and more expensive entitlement programs when we can't afford the ones we've got today. We've got to stop this culture of government dependence.

Remember, there are no cuts to Medicaid. Every year in Medicaid, you spend more money than you spent the year before under this plan, but the growth is not as great as it would be if you continued to pay, for instance, 100 percent for single able-bodied adults. Now, there is something wrong with the way that system is put together.

We have a serious structural deficit problem. And it needs to be addressed. The president is trying to address it through reforms of Social Security, but the problem is there with other entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

Mike Pence and Mitch Daniels in Indiana, the woman who's coming in to run the Medicaid program at the federal level, her name is Seema Verma, a brilliant young woman, she made Indiana - healthy Indiana work so that actually low-income people in Indiana, actually have real healthcare coverage that they get access to a doctor. Those kinds of reforms on the state level we want see happen in all 50 states.

The Medicaid program has been on the books for more than 50 years. The Graham-Cassidy bill proposes a dramatic, sweeping change in the way that program would be allocated and administered. And a program which does need reform, but we need careful reform. And I don't think this bill does that.

My state, Scott Walker, our governors, reformed Medicaid so it actually works, so that the doctors will take the program.

How about we let the states be innovative on Medicaid and do much better and smarter things?

The Medicaid system currently steers people toward nursing home care. Far more people can be covered in community-based care programs for significantly less.