[UPDATED] Budget Passes – Medicaid Cut

From the diaries by susanhbu.

Immoral. This budget is yet another example of the poor reaping the consequences of the rich’s decision-making. The Democrats were united against the budget because it cut Medicaid benefits.

Details (with updated vote line-up) below …

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, R-N.H., said it was a first step toward confronting the “massive problem” of meeting the nation’s defense and domestic spending needs while coping with relentlessly rising baby boomer health and retirement costs. “The president sent us a budget which for the first time in seven years stepped on the sacred ground of trying to address the entitlement costs of the federal budget,” he said.

 

It was the effort to control spending on the Medicaid health program for the poor — one of the three big entitlement programs, along with Medicare and Social Security — that created the biggest obstacle to agreement on the budget. Medicaid was last cut in 1997.

 

Democrats and some Republicans, led by Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, objected that cuts in projected spending for Medicaid would impose a hardship on states that rely heavily on federal grants to care for the poor.

The vote was 214-211 in the House and 52-47 in the Senate

Update [2005-4-29 9:2:15 by Man Eegee]:

The House of Representatives vote tally can be found here. No Democrats voted in favor of the budget.

We are the defenders of Social Security, Medicare and other social problems that are important to the people of this country.