The story behind Trump's Medicaid tweet
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On Wednesday afternoon, President Trump tweeted a graph from his personal account showing Medicaid spending under the Republican Senate health bill.
There's a story behind that tweet: In the Oval Office on Wednesday, Marc Short, the White House Legislative Affairs director, showed Trump a piece of paper with the graph of Medicaid spending pointing up. Trump wanted to tweet it, according to a source told about the meeting.
Why it matters: The graph doesn't show the other side of the Medicaid changes: the fact that spending would go down compared to current law, which is how Senate Republicans get $772 billion in savings. That's the whole point of the new spending limits.
This is all part of a broader White House strategy: They want to change the way it's presented in the media to help sway some of the Senate Republican holdouts.
- For the longest time, Republicans in all branches of government failed to frame the argument over Medicaid in terms of the Medicaid dollars going up. Some in the administration had concluded it was an argument they couldn't win. But a number of officials saw they were getting killed every day in the press, with reports of the billions being cut out of Medicaid. Some officials wanted to aggressively reframe the argument as a growth in spending — and a slowing of the growth rate under Obamacare rather than a raw "cut."
- Even at this late stage, the White House believes it's crucial to change the media narrative. A number of officials believe that some crucial senators are more heavily swayed by media coverage than they are by the substance of the cuts to the Medicaid spending under the Affordable Care Act.
HHS Secretary Tom Price has been making this argument, and tweeted a similar graph of Medicaid spending on Tuesday:
