Trump wants to slash Medicare

MSNBC - There’s a lot to chew on in Donald Trump’s new budget blueprint, but the Washington Post highlighted one of the key takeaways:

Trump’s “Budget for a Better America” also includes dozens of spending cuts and policy overhauls that frame the early stages of the debate for the 2020 election. For example, Trump for the first time calls for cutting $845 billion from Medicare, the popular health care program for the elderly that in the past he had largely said he would protect.

His budget would also propose a major overhaul of Medicaid, the health care program for low-income Americans run jointly with states, by turning more power over to states. This would save $241 billion over 10 years.

It’s easy to forget, but when Trump launched his presidential candidacy nearly four years ago, he was very far to the right on issues such as race and immigration, but he went out of his way to appear moderate on many other issues, especially social-insurance programs often known as “entitlements.”

As Trump argued in 2015, “I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid. Every other Republican’s going to cut, and even if they wouldn’t, they don’t know what to do because they don’t know where the money is. I do. I do.”