Medicaid

Floor Speech

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Mr. BRECHEEN. Mr. Speaker, Medicaid was created to provide health insurance for the poor, blind, disabled, pregnant, and elderly. Mr. Speaker, as you can see from this Paragon chart, Medicaid is no longer for the poor and now serves more people living above the poverty line than below it.

Additionally, since 2012, the Medicaid population has grown 60 percent, while the U.S. population has only grown about 6 percent according to the Foundation for Government Accountability.

Following ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion, able-bodied adults now make up its largest subgroup according to FGA. Democrats claim these able- bodied adults are working, but these claims are derived from self- reported data relying on sample sizes as small as a few dozen.

In reality, FGA has records for 21 million beneficiaries among 23 States showing that 6 in 10 of these able-bodied beneficiaries do not work at all.

As more able-bodied individuals are added to Medicaid, truly needy and disabled Americans are being displaced from priority services. 700,000 disabled Americans are stuck on Medicaid wait lists while able- bodied adults above the poverty line have access to taxpayer-funded healthcare.

The goal of social programs should never be to gain able-bodied enrollees, but to decrease government dependency and help them escape poverty as shown during this chart's depiction of the Contract With America and the first Trump administration time period.

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