Trump Medicaid chief Oz defends GOP’s reforms for rural hospitals

FIRST ON FOX: A top Trump White House official is looking to undercut Senate Democrats’ talking points on Medicaid, arguing that the GOP’s plan to reform the healthcare program would benefit rural hospitals, not harm them.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz told Fox News Digital that “special interests are pushing misleading talking points to try and stop the most ambitious healthcare reforms ever.”

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Oz’s sentiment comes as Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and Senate Republicans sprint to finish their work on President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” ahead of a self-imposed July 4 deadline.

Part of the bill from the Senate Finance Committee aims to make good on the GOP’s promise to root out waste, fraud and abuse within the widely used healthcare program by including work requirements and booting illegal immigrants from benefit rolls, among other measures.

Tweaks to the Medicaid provider tax rate have ruffled feathers on both sides of the aisle. Indeed, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., sent a letter to Trump and the top congressional Republicans last week warning that changes to the Medicaid provider tax rate would harm over 300 rural hospitals.

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And a cohort of Senate Republicans were furious with the change after the bill dropped last week.

But Oz contended that “only 5%” of inpatient Medicaid spending happens in rural communities, and that the mammoth bill “instead targets abuses overwhelmingly utilized by large hospitals with well-connected lobbyists.”

“We are committed to preserving and improving access to care in rural communities with a transformative approach that bolsters advanced technology, invests in infrastructure, and supports workforce — rather than propping up a system that mostly benefits wealthier urban areas,” Oz said.

Schumer’s letter included data from a study recently conducted by the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at his behest. He warned that if the bill is passed as is, millions of people would be kicked off of their healthcare coverage, and “rural hospitals will not get paid for the services they are required by law to provide to patients.”

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Fox News Digital reached out to Schumer, Wyden and Merkley for comment.

However, another report from the Trump-aligned Paragon Health Institute argued similarly to Oz that special interest groups and healthcare lobbyists were “flooding the airwaves with claims” that Republicans’ changes to Medicaid would shutter rural hospitals.

For example, they argued that a recent report from the Center for American Progress warned that over 200 rural hospitals would be at risk of closure, but that the findings were based on changes to the federal medical assistance percentage, or the amount of Medicaid costs paid for by the federal government.

Changes to that percentage were mulled by congressional Republicans but were not included in the “big, beautiful bill.”  

Still, the changes to the Medicaid provider tax rate, which were a stark departure from the House GOP’s version of the bill, angered the Republicans who have warned not to make revisions to the healthcare program that could shut down rural hospitals and boot working Americans from their benefits.

The Senate Finance Committee went further than the House’s freeze of the provider tax rate, or the amount that state Medicaid programs pay to healthcare providers on behalf of Medicaid beneficiaries, for non-Affordable Care Act expansion states, and included a provision that lowers the rate in expansion states annually until it hits 3.5%.

However, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, is working on a possible change to the bill that would create a provider relief fund that could sate her and other Republicans’ concerns about the change to the provider tax rate.