June 28, 2017 02:48 PM UTC

Tipton Writes Medicaid Checks Trumpcare Won't Cash

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Vail Daily’s Randy Wyrick reports on GOP Rep. Scott Tipton’s telephone town hall Monday evening:

If you depend on Medicaid now, then Republican health insurance bills won’t change that, said Rep. Scott Tipton…

Tipton said multiple times that anyone who qualified for Medicaid in the past will get to keep it under the Republican plan.

“If you qualify, you will still receive those Medicaid dollars,” Tipton said. “If you qualify for Medicaid, your Medicaid will continue.” [Pols emphasis]

Medicaid was designed to help America’s most vulnerable, Tipton said. Their care is a point of agreement, regardless of politics, he said.

“If you are low income and you qualify for Medicaid, you will continue to qualify for Medicaid,” Tipton said.

So first of all, there’s a big difference between the House Obamacare repeal bill that Tipton voted for and the Senate’s bill now under consideration–doubly important now that the House bill is effectively dead. The House bill did in fact include a provision that allowed Medicaid patients who qualified under the Obamacare Medicaid expansion to stay covered–as long as they maintain “continuous coverage,” which as Politifact explains is not how Medicaid coverage works for many patients in many cases:

The GOP health care bill that passed the House, along with the “discussion draft” circulated in the Senate, make changes to Medicaid for people who acquired health care coverage through Obamacare.

The House proposal includes a grandfather clause that allows people covered by expanded Medicaid as of Dec. 31, 2019, to continue to qualify for a 90 percent federal match rate. But the “grandfathered expansion enrollees” would have to maintain near-continuous coverage in order to get the higher rate. Experts say that is extremely difficult because of changes in income or because of changes states could choose to make.

The Senate plan, which remains just a draft, continues the Medicaid expansion program largely as is until 2020, before beginning to reduce federal funding for all enrollees. That means either states will have to pick up a larger share of the cost or make changes to the program. [Pols emphasis]

In either scenario, changes are likely. It’s just a matter of when and how.

In the most charitable analysis Rep. Tipton is relying on outdated information based on a bill that is now more or less a footnote in the history books, to make promises about the future of Medicaid expansion patients that simply don’t comport with the facts. It wasn’t really factual with the bill he voted on, and it’s certainly not with the Senate’s bill as it’s written today.

And in the worst case, Tipton is knowingly flat-out lying–or at the very least, knowingly making statements that aren’t backed up by facts.

Wait never mind, that’s lying.