Medical Xpress March 10, 2025
In Washington’s debate over enacting steep funding cuts to Medicaid, words are a central battleground.
Many Republican lawmakers and conservative policy officials who want to scale back the joint state-federal health program are using charged language to describe it. Language experts and advocates for Medicaid enrollees say their word choice is misleading and aims to sway public opinion against the popular, 60-year-old government program in a bid to persuade Congress to cut funding.
Republicans such as Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, are deploying provocative terms such as “money laundering,” rebranding a decades-old—and legal—practice known as provider taxes, which most states use to gain additional federal Medicaid funds.
They say it’s...
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