Under Whitehouse Spotlight, GOP Abandons $536 Billion Back-Door Medicare Cut

Washington, DC - U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) today announced that Republicans tucked in a provision on the last page of their government funding bill halting the impending half-trillion cut to Medicare that they had created through previous legislation. President Trump and Congressional Republicans' Big, Beautiful-for-Billionaires Law automatically triggered sequestration through the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act, which would have imposed $536 billion in automatic cuts to Medicare over nine years. Whitehouse relentlessly fought to raise public awareness about the Medicare cuts to pressure Republicans to change course.

"After months of sustained pressure, Republicans caved to undo the looming half-trillion-dollar cut to Medicare that they created before it started to hit Rhode Island seniors," said Whitehouse. "We were able to stop one prong of the Republican attack on our health care system, and the fight continues to lower the insurance premiums they sent skyrocketing and to protect Medicaid from the cuts they approved."

In July, President Trump and Congressional Republicans jammed through their Big, Beautiful-for-Billionaires bill, which cuts almost a trillion dollars from Medicaid and raises health insurance costs, all to bankroll tax breaks for billionaires and big corporations. By adding $4.1 trillion to the national debt, the legislation automatically triggered the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) Act, which would have imposed a half-trillion in automatic cuts to Medicare over the next decade, as confirmed to Whitehouse in an August letter from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

In September, Senate Republicans blocked a unanimous consent request to pass Senator Whitehouse's resolution to protect Medicare from the automatic cuts. In late August, Whitehouse published an op-ed highlighting Republicans' deceptive, destabilizing attacks on Social Security, Medicare and the entire American health care system in their Big, Beautiful-for-Billionaires bill.