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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Oregon senator aims to block Medicaid cuts

Alan Fram Associated Press

WASHINGTON – A moderate Republican is trying to strip all $14 billion in Medicaid cuts from the Senate’s $2.56 trillion budget, testing the GOP-run Congress’ appetite for trimming spending as President Bush has proposed.

As the Senate began debating the budget Monday, Republicans struggled behind the scenes to head off the amendment by Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore. Should Smith prevail later this week, it would mark an embarrassing rejection of one of the pillars of Bush’s budget and raise questions about how much deficit reduction the GOP can achieve.

“All the talk this year is about cracking down on spending,” including on Medicaid and agriculture aid, “and neither is getting very far,” said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group that advocates eliminating federal deficits. “What’s Plan B?”

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, R-N.H., told his colleagues Monday that a vote to erase the proposed Medicaid savings would mean “that individual doesn’t have any interest in our children or our children’s children” because of massive long-term budget deficits that are expected.

“There’s lots of folks around here scared of their own shadow,” Gregg added.

Medicaid, a joint federal-state program, provides health care to about 50 million low-income and disabled Americans and has become a major portion of many states’ budgets. Gregg said savings could come from eliminating inefficiencies and overpayments to states without harming beneficiaries, which many Democrats dispute.

Instead of cuts, Smith wants to create a commission to study Medicaid’s problems and report back in a year. In an interview, he predicted he would win and said the delay would provide time to build a consensus among governors and members of Congress worried the cuts would hurt their states.

“We’re not saying no, but we are saying let’s be careful,” Smith said.

Smith’s plan, which he was co-sponsoring with Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., would erase language in the budget requiring the Senate Finance Committee to find five-year savings of $15 billion in legislation later this year.

Gregg said $14 billion of that was assumed to come from Medicaid, meaning a 1 percent cut in the $1.12 trillion in federal funds the program is expected to spend over the next five years.

Like many benefit programs, its costs by law grow automatically to cover inflation and numbers of recipients unless Congress enacts changes.

The budget language Smith is targeting would also shield the Medicaid savings from filibusters – procedural delays that can kill a bill unless 60 of the 100 senators vote to end them.

Without those procedural protections, “nothing’s going to happen” to save money from Medicaid, Gregg said. “That’s just the nature of the beast.”

In the first vote, senators by 49-44 rejected another Bingaman proposal shrinking the proposed tax cut and splitting the money between education and deficit reduction.