#medicaid

#medicaid

Driving the news: Musk took to X on Friday to celebrate the release of Medicaid data on claims, medical procedures and payments from January 2018 through December 2024. "Medicaid data has been open sourced, so the level of fraud is easy to identify," Musk wrote. "DOGE is not a department, it's a state of mind." The Department of Health and Human Services collects Medicaid claims data from states that administer the program. Until now, much of the information has been fragmented and difficult to access.

"The federal Medicaid cuts are an absolute disaster for HCBS," said Sabrina Epstein, a policy analyst at Disability Rights California.

"There are some that say he's a dictator. Well, no, he's not a dictator - we voted him in," she said. "I think it would all be a lot better if we didn't resist the federal government and instead just got together and said, 'Hey, I'm with you ... Let's sit down, work together and clean it up instead of fight it'."

Republicans in the House of Representatives can't get much done - except when it comes to attacking the trans community. Then they can still manage to pull out all the stops. Just last week, Republicans, joined by a handful of Democrats, passed a bill to ban Medicaid from funding any gender-affirming care for minors. That was on top of another bill that they passed to criminalize gender-affirming care for trans youth.

So far 14 of the 17 of largest pharmaceutical companies have agreed to lower US drug prices. United States President Donald Trump announced new agreements aimed at lowering prescription drug prices. On Friday, alongside leaders from Bristol Myers Squibb, Gilead Sciences, and Merck, among other leading pharma giants, the president announced deals that would cut prices on their medications to match that of the developed nation with the lowest price.

They would rather have us focus in and debate a misunderstood and vulnerable one percent of the population instead of focusing in on the fact that they are raiding everyone's healthcare in order to pay for tax breaks for the wealthiest one percent. All Republican politicians care about is making the rich richer and attacking trans people. They are obsessed with trans people. I actually think they think more about trans people than trans people think about trans people. They are consumed with this.

"They would rather have us focus in and debate a misunderstood and vulnerable one percent of the population," she said during a press scrum outside the Capitol with out Rep. Julie Johnson (D-TX) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), "instead of focusing in on the fact that they are raiding everyone's health care in order to pay for tax breaks for the wealthiest one percent."

We're here to discuss two bills coming up, HR 498 and HR 3492, Mitchell said. The two bills, introduced this week for a planned vote on Wednesday, both targeted gender-affirming healthcare for children the first time Congress has voted over national care bans and a major escalation of anti-trans rhetoric from conservative US lawmakers.

The administrator for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Mehmet Oz, recently claimed that an audit revealed more than $1bn of federal taxpayer dollars were being spent on funding Medicaid for illegal immigrants, but experts say the audits were unrelated to immigration, and that rhetoric like this could make immigrant families regardless of legal status afraid to seek necessary medical care.

Donald Trump shows me what's politically possible, he said on The Breakfast Club on Monday. Trump shows me what presidents can do when they want to do it. Donald Trump shows me what can be said if you're willing to say it. It's not about what can't be done; it's about who has the political will to do it. I don't want to hear a peep from Democrats about nothing until they get the ball to say what's really on their mind in regards to this country and this world," he said.

We worked on rescissions, and there'll be more of that, we expect, in the days ahead,

Many Massachusetts residents are at risk of losing their Medicaid coverage, SNAP benefits, and more under the cuts. Massachusetts officials launched a new online dashboard this week designed to clearly show how federal funding cuts are negatively impacting Massachusetts under the Trump administration. All told, the state has lost about $3.7 billion due to President Trump and a Congress beholden to him, according to the dashboard.

Republican lawmakers gathered around Donald Trump as he signed his significant legislation, yet Mike Flood faced boos and jeers while trying to explain its benefits to constituents.

Robert Gordon expressed concern over the implementation of Medicaid work requirements, stating, 'We're implementing this about as well as this thing can be implemented, and it is still going to be pretty catastrophic.'