Sen Ron Johnson did an interview with Politico, at which time he said that he wanted to take a “second bite” out of Medicaid. He also said that he had commitments from leadership and the White House to let him do just that:
“I think I pretty well have a commitment. They’re going to do that,” Johnson told reporters of the prospects that Republicans will reconsider a provision that would end the federal government’s 90 percent cost share of funding for new enrollees in states that expanded Medicaid under the Democrats’ 2010 health care law.
Johnson added that he ended up voting for Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” largely because he was given assurances of the proposed cuts, despite his significant concerns about the deficit projections under the bill.
“Another reason why I definitely had to vote ‘yes,’ I would have just dealt myself out of being involved in that process. And I wanted to be highly involved in that process,” said Johnson of the potential to include the Medicaid expansion cost-sharing cuts in a second party-line bill later this year. “That’s where I gained a fair amount of confidence from the White House, the President, our leadership, that we will have a second bite of the apple.”
