What Next | Here’s How the GOP Cuts Medicaid

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Slate Podcasts

News, News Commentary, Politics

4.6 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In a return to a classic party policy goal, Republicans want to add “work requirements” to Medicaid to offset costs in Trump’s “one big beautiful bill.” Work requirements for health insurance have been tried before, on the state level, and the end result is a lot of people—including working people—losing their health insurance. Guest: Leo Cuello, research professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families and former Health Policy Director of the National Health Law Program. Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen. Podcast production by Ethan Oberman, Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, Isabel Angell, and Rob Gunther. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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1:12.6	Last week, the New York Times published an op-ed with a remarkably star-studded byline.
1:18.6	Its authors were the Secretary of Health and Human Services, R of K, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, that's Dr. Oz, the HUD Secretary, the Secretary of Agriculture.
1:26.0	These four were all united behind a single headline.
1:29.6	If you want welfare and can work, you must.
1:37.4	I sort of wonder if that title was engineered in a lab to make you cringe.
1:43.9	Yeah, I mean, it's problematic in a lot of ways.
1:50.8	Leo Cueo is a lawyer who works in public policy, mostly health care. What drove him nuts about this
1:57.5	op-ed is that it makes the case for work requirements, for Medicaid recipients, by leaning on a history that he says is just plain wrong.
2:07.6	Leo gets why the GOP might be leaning on faulty data.
2:12.6	Republicans want to cut $880 billion from the budget, with the big, beautiful, reconciliation
	...

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