Speaker Johnson - who claims to base his political positions on the Bible - continues to lie

Back in January, I documented that Mike Johnson - who claims to base his politics on biblical principles - told seven lies about immigration in a short four-minute video clip. The Republican House Speaker continues to lie, and recently told a couple of whoppers about federal spending. 

In speaking about the Musk/DOGE efforts to destroy the federal bureaucracy, Johnson said this:

Johnson: "Elon's cracked the code. He's now inside these agencies. He's created these algorithms that are constantly crawling through the data & as he told me in his office, data doesn't lie. We're gonna be able to get the information. We're gonna be able to transform the way federal govt works."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 24, 2025 at 11:35 AM

In that video, Johnson claimed that the "deep state" hid information about federal spending from congress, and now, "Elon's cracked the code." 

What he doesn't want you to know is that in 2006, congress passed a bill titled "Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act." It was introduced by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) and signed by President George W. Bush. As a result, the website usaspending.gov was created, providing everyone - including congress - with access to detailed information about all federal spending.  

In other words, no one was hiding any information - much less the so-called "deep state." Unless he and his staff were too lazy to search a database, Johnson has always had access to the data that doesn't lie.

Along a similar track, Johnson and House Republicans are paving the way to cut $880 billion from Medicaid - which will result in over 20 million people losing their health care coverage. The Speaker is also lying about that.  

REPORTER: Can you say unequivocally that down the line, there won't be cuts to Medicaid programs? MIKE JOHNSON: Medicaid is hugely problematic because it has a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse.

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 25, 2025 at 9:58 AM

First of all, everyone DOESN'T know "intuitively" that Medicaid is "hugely problematic because it has a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse."  But to justify his claim, Johnson suggested that experts identified $50 million per year in fraud alone. That's a lie. Here's what he's referring to:

Each year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) releases estimated Payment Error Rate Measure (PERM) rates on improper payments in Medicaid...The overall 2024 improper payment rate was 5.09 percent, down from 8.58 percent in 2023...

It’s important to note that most of the improper payments are made for eligible health services for people who were eligible for Medicaid; the issue is that proper documentation for the payments is missing. That means that the improper payment rate is a measure of procedural errors not a fraud rate, nor is it an accurate count of funds that were misspent.

In other words, an error in documentation =/= fraud. Furthermore, CMS took specific steps to correct these documentation errors in 2024. 

The truth is that Medicaid fraud doesn't have anything to do with recipients or the services they are eligible to receive. 

The December 2024 report [from HHS and DOJ] lists examples of the different kinds of fraud against Medicaid (and Medicare) that the agencies have identified and prosecuted. Among those convicted are ambulance service providers, durable medical equipment suppliers, diagnostic labs, nursing homes, pain clinics, pharmacies, physical therapists, physicians, and substance use treatment providers. No beneficiaries are in the listing.

It's not the beneficiaries - it's the providers that are committing fraud. So as always, it is important to follow the money.

Given that, if Johnson and his Republican pals actually wanted to address the issue of fraud in Medicaid, they might have objected to Trump's firing of the HHS Inspector General. 

Since 2007, the OIG [Office of Inspector General] and the Department of Justice have been operating a special joint task force to root out waste, fraud and abuse in a dozen major metropolitan areas.

The Health Care Fraud Unit has charged more than 5,400 defendants with fraudulently billing Medicare, Medicaid, and private health insurers more than $27 billion...

The OIG’s semiannual reports to Congress estimated the agency recovered close to $10 billion for Medicare and Medicaid in 2024, nearly 20 times the 1,500-person agency’s annual budget.

What all of these lies tell us is that Speaker Johnson isn't interested in data, nor is he actually concerned about waste, fraud, and abuse. As I have pointed out previously, he is a Christian reconstructionist, meaning that he believes that the welfare state must be destroyed.