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First Fox: Top Trump White House officials have shrouded Senate Democrats’ talk about Medicaid and argued that GOP’s plans to reform health care programs will not harm rural hospitals.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Center for Administrators for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told Fox News Digital, “We are trying to stop the most ambitious health care reforms ever, by promoting the misleading of special interests.”
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Dr. Mehmet Oz, newly sworn Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator, will speak at the ceremony at the White House Oval Office ceremony held in Washington on April 18, 2025. (Andrew Harnik)
Oz’s sentiment comes as a sprint for Senate majority leader John Tune and Senate Republicans to finish off the work on President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Building” ahead of the voluntary deadline on July 4th.
Part of the Senate Finance Committee bill aims to create a GOP’s commitment to eradicate waste, fraud and abuse within widely used healthcare programs by launching benefits immigrants, including job requirements.
Medicaid provider tax rate tweaks ruffle feathers on either side of the aisle. Certainly, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, DN.Y. Officer Ron Wyden, D-ore. and Jeff Merkley (D-ore.) last week wrote to Trump and top Congressional Republicans warning that changes in Medicaid provider tax rates would harm more than 300 rural hospitals.
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Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, DN.Y., US Capitol Building in Washington, June 3, 2025 (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
And a cohort of Senate Republicans were furious at the change after the bill fell last week.
However, Oz argued that rural communities have “just 5%” of inpatient Medicaid spending, and that the mammoth bill “instead it targets abuses that are overwhelmingly used by large hospitals with connected lobbyists.”
“We are committed to preserving and improving access to care in rural communities with a transformative approach that enhances advanced technology, invests in infrastructure and supports the workforce.
Schumer’s letter included data from a study recently conducted by the Cecil G. Shepps Center for Health Services Center at the University of North Carolina at his request. He warned that if the bill was passed as is, millions of people would be kicked out of medical compensation and that “rural hospitals will not be paid for the services they are required to provide to patients.”
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Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” was sent to the Senate after the House voted to pass the bill. (AP; Getty; Fox News Digital)
Fox News Digital reached Schumer, Wyden and Merkley for comment.
But another report from the Paragon Health Institute, which lined up with Trump, claimed special interest groups and healthcare lobbyists as well as Republicans’ changes to Medicaid would “are flooded with airwaves” that the GOP would close rural hospitals.
For example, they argued that a recent report from the Centers for Progress in America puts more than 200 rural hospitals at risk of closures, but that the findings were based on changes to federal healthcare aid rate or the amount of Medicaid costs paid by the federal government.
That percentage change was contemplated by Congressional Republicans, but was not included in the “big and beautiful bill.”
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Still, changes to Medicaid providers’ tax rates were totally deviating from the House GOP version of the bill, which angered Republicans who warned against revising health programs that could close rural hospitals and keep working Americans out of the benefits.
The Senate Treasury Committee includes a provision that freezes the House provider tax rate, or state Medicaid programs that pay healthcare providers on behalf of Medicaid beneficiaries, are even further than what they pay to healthcare providers on the expanded state of the Affordable Care Act, lowering the tax rates in the expanded state each year until it reaches 3.5%.
But R-Maine Sen. Susan Collins is working on possible changes to the bill that will create a Provider Relief Fund that will protect her and other Republicans’ concerns about changes to the provider tax rate.
Alex Miller is a writer for Fox News Digital, which covers the US Senate.
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