President Trump signed his One, Big, Beautiful Bill into law on July 4, ushering in transformational changes to our tax laws, our border, as well as the most ambitious reforms to welfare programs in three decades. Yet some in Jackson are making the argument that President Trump’s historic progress against welfare fraud is a convenient excuse to expand Medicaid in Mississippi. This idea is preposterous, and it needs to be called out before anybody falls for it.
In 2010, President Obama rammed ObamaCare through Congress and passed it on the thinnest and most partisan of margins. To corral the whole swath of Democrats, President Obama and his allies came up with a grab bag of bad ideas. One of these bad ideas was the ObamaCare expansion, which allowed states to give Medicaid to an entirely new class of able-bodied adults with the federal government footing the bill. Fifteen years later, Mississippi is one of only 10 states that have stood strong against the deception of ObamaCare. One by one, other states are finding out that there is nothing more expensive than free money from the government.
President Trump’s One, Big, Beautiful Law doesn’t touch Medicaid benefits, but it takes unprecedented steps to stop waste, fraud, and abuse, and ensure that Medicaid is working for those who really need it. President Trump’s law makes states double-check people’s eligibility more often, and the Trump administration has already found nearly three million people double-dipping Medicaid by receiving it in multiple states concurrently or receiving heavily subsidized ObamaCare exchange plans on top of Medicaid benefits. Even the Congressional Budget Office admits that the new Trump law also kicks millions of illegal aliens off of Medicaid, although blue states are fighting this tooth and nail.
One of the most important reforms in the new law is that it requires able-bodied, expansion adults on Medicaid to work, train, or volunteer at least part time. Yet some political insiders in Mississippi have been tempted to look at President Trump’s fixes to the welfare system as an opportunity to “conservatively” expand Medicaid and get “free” money from the federal taxpayer. This pro-ObamaCare, pro-expansion lobby has tried and failed to expand Medicaid multiple times, and they haven’t given up yet.
The state legislature nearly passed Medicaid expansion in 2024, but the House and Senate couldn’t work out the details, so the bills died before reaching the governor’s desk. In 2025, the bills never made it out of committee. Good riddance. The same thing should happen the next time someone tries to expand Medicaid in our state.
Expanding Medicaid is completely antithetical to everything that President Trump and his One, Big, Beautiful Bill are all about. President Trump has done more to root out fraud than any president before. Yet when states expand Medicaid, they see waste, fraud, and abuse explode. The rate of improper payments in Medicaid tripled since 2014, as states around the country fell for the ObamaCare hoax and expanded Medicaid.
The Trump welfare reforms are a bandage for states that are wounded because they expanded Medicaid. We shouldn’t wound ourselves just because President Trump gave us a bandage. Having a great president in Washington doesn’t mean that we no longer need great policies in Jackson. We need both, and we can’t let our guard down.
Governor Reeves is a strong supporter of President Trump and a strong opponent of expanding Medicaid. We can count on him to stand in the gap against another attempt to take the ObamaCare expansion bribe. But Governor Reeves is term limited and won’t be in office forever. Mississippians must remain vigilant to ensure that this idea doesn’t rear its ugly head again. And, if it does, true Trump supporters need to call it out. Tell your representatives in Jackson to keep Medicaid for those who need it: Don’t fall for the lies and deception of ObamaCare expansion.
