Chuck Schumer claims that “Medicare and Medicaid” are the “backbone of our healthcare system for tens of millions of Americans,” and “Donald Trump and Republicans are trying to rip it all away.”

IN FACT, Medicare and Medicaid have become costly and inefficient, and Republicans are attempting to make these programs sustainable while Democrats run up their costs and taxes. Here are the specifics:

• Medicare and Medicaid spend $1.6 trillion per year, consuming about 29% of all federal tax revenues and costing every household in the U.S. an average of $11,744 per year. These figures don’t include state taxes that are allocated to Medicaid and fund about 36% of the program’s total spending.
• Medicare and Medicaid wasted $831 billion on overpayments from 2015 to 2024, amounting to 56% of all known federal overpayments and costing every household in the nation an average of $6,450.
• When Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson proposed the Medicare hospital insurance program in his 1964 State of the Union speech, he promised that it would cost “no more than $1 a month” per worker, which adjusted for inflation, is less than $11 in 2026.
• Due to laws primarily enacted by Democrats, the Medicare hospital insurance payroll tax is now unlimited and costs workers 2.9% of their wages up $200,000/year and 3.8% thereafter. Thus, workers who earn $100,000 now pay $242 per month for this tax, and workers who earn $1,000,000 pay about $3,000 per month.
• Medicare’s hospital insurance payroll taxes now fund only 35% of Medicare’s total spending, and other federal revenues finance the rest of the program.
• Since the time that Medicare was established in 1965, the general eligibility age for benefits has stayed at 65 years old, while increases in life expectancy have extended the average time that people receive Medicare benefits by about 35%.
• Under current law, Medicare has amassed $60.8 trillion in unfunded obligations, which is about 50% more than the national debt, or an average of $226,000 from all current participants in the program, including both taxpayers and beneficiaries.
• Due to future cuts in Medicare payment rates implemented by Democrats in Obamacare, the current law likely understates the unfunded obligations of Medicare by about 24%.
• Federal law requires all nonprofit hospitals to treat Medicare and Medicaid patients, while Medicare pays hospitals an average of 17% below their costs of caring for Medicare patients, and Medicare pays hospitals 12% below their costs of caring for Medicaid patients, thus forcing hospitals to shift these expenses to other patients.
• In 2022, 100% of Democrats voted for and 100% of Republicans voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, which capped Medicare recipients’ out-of-pocket drug costs at $2,000 per year, which significantly raised the average Medicare drug premium and forced seniors who don’t use a lot of drugs to pick up the tab for those who do.
• In 2025, the Congressional Budget Office revealed that federal spending on Medicare drug benefits could be “about $500 billion more than CBO previously projected” largely due to the Inflation Reduction Act, which has led to “large increases in spending on specialty drugs,” insurers “building higher profit margins and higher administrative costs into their plan bids,” and drug companies reducing their “patient assistance programs” and thereby “increasing the volume of prescriptions financed by the government.”
• From 1975 to 2024, the portion of the U.S. population receiving Medicaid for “certain low-income persons” rose from 9% to 26% while the poverty rate stayed roughly level at 13% ± 2 points.
• Gold standard randomized controlled trials published by the journal Science and the New England Journal of Medicine found that no-copay Medicaid coverage increases expensive visits to emergency rooms for “conditions that may be most readily treatable in primary care settings,” contrary to Barack Obama’s claim that the opposite would occur.
• A gold standard randomized controlled trial of Medicaid in Oregon published by the New England Journal of Medicine found that “Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years, but it did increase use of health care services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain.”
• In 2025, 98% of Republicans voted for and 100% of Democrats voted against the Big Beautiful Bill, which reduces Medicaid spending through the following provisions.
• To receive Medicaid, the BBB requires “nonpregnant, nondisabled adults, aged 19 through 64” who don’t have a “dependent child under the age of 14” to “complete a minimum of 80 hours” per “month” of “work,” “community service, or enrollment in an education program.”
• The BBB prevents illegal immigrants and other aliens from receiving Medicaid under executive fiats that make them “lawfully present” for the purpose of receiving government benefits even though they don’t have “legal status” to be in the United States.
• The BBB contains a range of fraud prevention measures like “address verification” and “ensuring deceased individuals do not remain enrolled” in Medicaid, which has the second-highest level of improper payments among all federal programs.
• The BBB stops states like California from using a tax kickback scheme to obtain more federal money for Medicaid, which is fungible and can be used to fund comprehensive Medicaid coverage for illegal immigrants, as California does for 1.7 million aliens.
• The BBB lowers the max copay for Medicaid recipients who are not poor from $100 to $35 and requires states that charge them no copays to at least charge them something, in accord with gold standard studies which found that no-copay Medicaid coverage increases expensive visits to emergency rooms for “conditions that may be most readily treatable in primary care settings.”
• Beyond Schumer, politicians like Bernie Sanders, Jon Ossoff, and Elizabeth Warren have characterized the measures above as “savage cuts to Medicaid,” “gutting Medicaid,” and taking healthcare away from “little babies.”

Hyperlinks to the sources of all the facts above are available at https://www.justfactsdaily.com/in-fact/n0000869