During his congressional forum on Wednesday, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) discussed stabilizing Social Security and Medicaid.
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00:00While we're in the process of trying to be able to have these arguments, there'll be 10,000 things that are thrown out there.
00:06Most of them will never happen.
00:08But according to social media, all of them happened yesterday.
00:12I do understand that.
00:13Let me give you a for instance.
00:15We started talking about Medicaid and saying we've got to deal with some structural issues with Medicaid.
00:21Immediately social media exploded and said this is going to cut off Medicaid entirely.
00:27Then they're going after Medicare.
00:29Then they're going to shut off Social Security.
00:31Wow.
00:32That moved fast.
00:34Here's what the proposal was initially on Medicaid only.
00:38By the way, with the tax proposal we're talking about on what's called reconciliation, by law we cannot do anything on Social Security.
00:47So not only is there no proposal on Social Security right now at all that's even being discussed, by law we cannot even talk about it.
00:55So, no, there's nothing being changed on Social Security.
00:59But I would give you a caveat.
01:01Eight years from now, Social Security goes and so on.
01:04That means every single Social Security recipient, their benefits will be cut by law by 20%.
01:10That cannot happen.
01:12That cannot happen.
01:13So the real question is, when are we going to have the grown-up conversations about Social Security to be able to make sure that we stabilize that program long-term?
01:23Something that Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan did decades ago.
01:27When is that going to happen again?
01:29And how are we as a country going to encourage lawmakers to say sit down with each other across the aisle and solve that problem?
01:36That's what has to occur.
01:40On the Medicaid side, we need to talk about that.
01:42Here are the two big proposals that are out there on Medicaid right now.
01:46One is, on most of our social safety net programs that are in the federal government, there's also a work requirement.
01:53I go back to this, but you know where the work requirement got added in?
01:57Under President Clinton.
01:59That's when he got added in.
02:00Almost all of our social safety net programs happened back then.
02:04That used to be a nonpartisan issue, where it was, how are we going to encourage people to be able to get back to the workforce?
02:11Because the workforce is where you rise out of poverty.
02:14The Brookings Institute, which is the center-left think tank, the Brookings Institute has, for years, actually put out their own study to say,
02:22how do people that are born in poverty rise out of poverty?
02:25Year after year, they do this study, and year after year, it comes out with the same results.
02:29Three things occur.
02:30These three things occur.
02:3297% chance you rise out of poverty if you're born in poverty.
02:36If you wait until after marriage to have children, if you graduate from high school, and you have a job of any type,
02:45even if it's entry-level minimum wage, 97% chance that you rise out of poverty in your lifetime.
02:5397%.
02:54Wait until after marriage to have children, graduate high school, and have a job of any type.
03:00If we want to help people to be able to rise, one of the things that we should do is help people to be able to get to employment.
03:08That should be an incentive.
03:10And I've said this to this group before.
03:12I will say it again.
03:12I don't believe that work is punishment.
03:15Work is actually purposeful, not punishment.
03:18It gives us a reason to get out of bed.
03:20It changes the perspective of what's happening in my life to how am I serving other people.
03:24It turns our attention to how can I serve rather than how can I be served.
03:28Work is beneficial.
03:30And for those of us from a Christian worldview, in the Garden of Eden, before the fall, there was already work.
03:37Remember, God told them to tend the garden before the fall.
03:41Now, it got harder after the fall.
03:43I'm all aware of that.
03:45But work is not punishment.
03:47We were created to be able to work.
03:49We were created to be able to serve each other, to be able to care for each other in that way.
03:53And that's beneficial for our families and for our communities on this.
03:57So here's our crazy idea.
03:59Medicaid right now, for healthy adults with no children, no dependents, there is no work requirement.
04:07It's one of the few social safety net programs that doesn't have that.
04:12We're not talking about disabled individuals.
04:15We're not talking about moms with young children.
04:17We're talking about adults with no children that are healthy, that are on the Medicaid program.
04:23Why would we not have a work requirement then?
04:25What would the difference would a work requirement make in that?
04:28Well, the first thing is, if they get into employment somewhere, most likely they're going to get employer-based care, and they're off their program entirely.
04:36That helps every single part of the program itself.
04:40That's a big issue, to be able to just incentivize people to be able to get to a job of any type on it, and to be able to get employer-based care.
04:47Those things make a difference in our federal budget.
04:51Here's another one.
04:53Right now, if someone lives in Arkansas, sees the light, and they move to Oklahoma, when they get here, if they're on Medicaid, it's very likely Medicaid is still paying Arkansas's benefit and Oklahoma's benefit.
05:09Very likely, because the system has literally not been updated to if they move in a year to be able to know where to be able to pay.
05:18So that $3 billion is lost just from Medicaid literally paying for the same treatment in two different states, when there was only one treatment in one state.
05:31There's some structural problems that are in Medicaid that are in the billions of dollars that we should be able to address.
05:36Those are some of the crazy ideas that we're bringing up.
05:39And when I actually have a rational conversation with someone about Medicaid, they go, actually, that kind of makes sense.
05:43Why didn't we do that a long time ago?
05:45There are billions of dollars and other things that we're trying to examine to say, how do we actually get this back to a stable system so we can operate this?
05:53And as you go throughout the federal government, we're trying to ask those questions of every single program to say, what can we do to be able to pull back our spending on the tax piece of it?
06:03Because in the bill that we're going to try to bring, we're hopefully going to bring this by the end of July.
06:07If it gets past July, blame it on Kevin Hurd in the House.
06:11It wasn't the Senate and the House.
06:12Tell him I said that too.
06:13We'll see him.
06:14But the Senate and the House are working together.
06:17Kevin and I have had lots of meetings and conversations to be able to talk about what are we doing together to get them to see if we can't get a simple proposal on this to get this resolved.
06:24We hope to have this done by the end of July.