Oh, this is not good at all if you are thinking there has been a focus change in deficit spending.
We are not asking you to slash Medicaid, only turn back the clock and reverse its explosive expansion in the last few years that has put it on an unsustainable course.
In the last five years, federal Medicaid spending has skyrocketed from $409 billion in 2019 to $618 billion in 2024, a 51% increase. Despite being 60 years old, a third of Medicaid’s growth has occurred in those same five years. And in the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office projects that Medicaid will cost more than $1 trillion annually, rivaling the size of Saudi Arabia’s current economy.
The article goes on to talk about the Clinton changes in which you had to, if able-bodied, be working or your eligibility didn't exist -- and Obamacare, particularly in Medicaid expansion states, turned the program into a "gibs-me-dat" thing.
But the issue isn't "insurance" when you have a problem of this sort: It's cost, and you cannot address cost when you have a cartel operating in a given field.
Said cartel behavior is unlawful and has been for over 100 years; so says 15 USC Chapter 1 and two Supreme Court decisions that indeed it applies (Royal Drug and Maricopa County), both of which are now more than forty years old and were not overridden by Obamacare or any other legislation since.
Problem: Address this, which is responsible for five times escalation in cost, and that all comes out which means 15% of the economy disappears!
Yes, it will be extremely disruptive if that comes out.
But it has to come out or you can't solve the problem with spiraling debt and debt service which will destroy the economy and all asset prices.
That is the problem and I am in no way encouraged that the Trump Administration or Congress has any intent to take it on and solve it and until that happens there is no way to have any sort of sustainable economic base which means all you have left in all asset markets is bubbles.
All bubbles can randomly run into a pin -- without warning.