Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz celebrated the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act on Monday.
President Donald Trump signed the spending bill into law earlier this month. It enforced work requirements for able-bodied Medicaid recipients who don’t have children.
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Oz said on Fox News’s Fox and Friends on Monday that Medicaid wasn’t always meant for “able-bodied individuals.” Instead, Oz paraphrased Vice President Hubert Humphrey to say the government’s role is to help those “at the dawn of their life, the children; those at the twilight of their life, the elderly; and those living in the shadows, folks with handicaps.”
This quote is so vital to the Health and Human Services Department’s purpose that it is on a wall inside its headquarters.
“We have to keep it viable,” Oz said of Medicaid. “And what happened over the last few years is a complete perversion of that mission, a destruction of its core purpose that led to its being at risk of bankruptcy. We would have spent $5.4 trillion more instead of the $200 billion that we actually did put into it. So I’ll say that again. We would have put a ton of money into it that would have bankrupted the system.”
The administrator congratulated Congress because it “wisely put more money in, $200 billion, but then went one step further, and under the president’s guidance, we actually fixed the fraud, waste, and abuse, specifically work requirements.”
“When the program was created 60 years ago, it never dawned on anyone that you would take able-bodied individuals who could work and put them on Medicaid,” he said. “Today, the average able-bodied person on Medicaid who doesn’t work, they watch 6.1 hours of television or just hang out. That’s not fair.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) voted against the legislation when it came to his chamber. Paul cited several reasons for his vote, but one was that the legislation did not do enough to stop states from covering illegal immigrants.
“When the Senate returns this week, I will introduce a bill to block federal taxpayer-funded Medicaid for illegal aliens immediately, not 15 months from now like the ‘Not-Yet-Beautiful Bill’ does,” Paul wrote in the Washington Examiner.
“My bill will also reduce enhanced federal payments to state programs that cover illegal immigrants, a provision that was dropped from the ‘Not-Yet-Beautiful Bill,’” he added.
According to a report from the Government Accountability Office, improper payments cost upward of $50 billion in 2023. For over 10 years, this cost could add up to more than $500 billion.
DR. OZ ASKS WHY STATES ARE ‘PAYING FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS GETTING HEALTHCARE’
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced it would no longer give states federal dollars to fund portions of their Medicaid programs, such as internet services and housekeeping, that do not involve providing health services to low-income Americans.
Medicaid provides health insurance coverage to about 79 million people and costs $584 billion in federal dollars in 2024.