VERIFYING Kamala Harris’ claim that Trump tried to cut Medicare every year he was president

Vice President Kamala Harris is on the campaign trail, holding events and rallies across the country leading up to the 2024 presidential election. 

Several readers asked us to VERIFY a claim Harris made during a recent campaign event about former President Donald Trump’s actions in the White House. Harris was critical of Trump’s alleged efforts to cut Medicare while he was president.

“[Trump] tried to cut Medicare every year he was president, threatening a program that tens of millions of seniors count on,” she said during a campaign event in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Aug. 16.

Multiple VERIFY readers asked us to look into her claim.

THE SOURCES

WHAT WE FOUND

While president, Trump did propose annual budgets that would have reduced federal spending on Medicare by hundreds of millions of dollars. 

Those cuts would have primarily reduced payments to health care providers, which may have reduced seniors’ access to care or services. Other presidents, including Barack Obama, have floated similar Medicare spending cuts in the past, experts say. 

Few of Trump’s proposals were actually enacted as part of annual budgets that Congress passed, according to Paul Van de Water, a senior fellow with the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

Here’s what we can VERIFY about Trump’s proposed annual budgets.

How Trump’s budget proposals would have impacted Medicare spending

When VERIFY reached out to Kamala Harris’ campaign about her claim, a spokesperson pointed us toward Trump’s White House budget proposals, saying he “tried to cut Medicare” in each of them.

Trump’s proposed budgets for fiscal years 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 did propose cuts to the federal government’s Medicare spending, according to various experts who analyzed the budgets.

Trump’s budgets for fiscal years 2019, 2020 and 2021 proposed variations of at least $500 billion in net Medicare spending cuts over a decade. Experts say most of these spending cuts would have come in the form of reduced payments to health care providers.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that supports lower deficits, estimated that 85% of Trump’s proposed Medicare savings included in the fiscal year 2020 budget would come from reductions in payments to providers. Many of these proposed reductions in provider payments are similar to proposals that were previously floated in former President Barack Obama’s budgets, the CRFB said. 

These changes would “help Medicare to offer care more efficiently,” leading to reduced coinsurances and premiums for seniors, the CRFB said.

What Trump’s proposed budget cuts could have meant for seniors on Medicare

None of Trump’s proposed Medicare budgets would have eliminated seniors’ medical insurance or prescription drug benefits. But there could have been trickle-down effects from not paying providers as much, such as reduced access to care and services, experts say. Trump’s proposed budgets didn’t pass, so the actual impact they would have had on Medicare beneficiaries is unknown. 

The CRFB said that the proposed reductions in payments to providers “could impact quality of and access to care on the margins,” but said they would mainly “help Medicare to offer care more efficiently.” 

“It is plausible they would have reduced access to providers and services, though I think it’s unlikely they would have done so in any meaningful way,” Loren Adler, a fellow and associate director at the Center on Health Policy at the Brookings Institution, told VERIFY. 

The 2020 budget proposal also included reforms to Medicare Part D drug coverage. These changes would have reduced out-of-pocket costs for some people on Medicare, including people with the highest spending while raising costs for others, Van de Water and the CRFB explained.

But “outside of the Part D benefit redesign, the budget didn’t include any proposed changes in “premiums, deductible, copays, or coinsurance and no significant changes to benefits themselves. Costs would generally fall for both beneficiaries and the federal government,” the CRFB said. 

Other Trump administration proposals outside of the budgets would have had “significant effects on Medicare beneficiaries,” according to Van de Water. They include an executive order calling for various Medicare changes and Trump’s past efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which is also known as Obamacare, he explained in a 2020 blog. 

Though many of the executive order’s proposed changes were “vague” and would “require changes in law or regulation,” it sought to promote private Medicare Advantage plans over traditional Medicare offered by the federal government and could have raised costs “for some or all beneficiaries by increasing payment rates to providers,” Van de Water said. 

Striking down Obamacare could negatively affect beneficiaries in several ways, including by reopening the Medicare “donut hole” under which beneficiaries paid all of their drug costs until they reached the yearly catastrophic spending threshold and reintroducing cost sharing for preventive services, according to Van de Water. 

Trump says he doesn’t currently support Medicare cuts

Trump has suggested in the past that he would be open to cuts in Medicare and Social Security benefits. During a 2020 interview with CNBC, Trump was asked if entitlement cuts would ever be on his agenda and he responded, “At some point they will.”

But Trump’s current policy as well as the Republican party platform both do not call for cutting Social Security and Medicare. 

Project 2025, an initiative created by a conservative think tank called The Heritage Foundation that provides a roadmap intended for the next conservative president to transform the government, does include proposals that may increase costs for Medicare beneficiaries. But Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025 on multiple occasions.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.