Is federal Medicaid spending, which last year amounted to over $580 billion, a virtual sacred cow for which reform or cuts in spending are unthinkable?

House Republicans in Congress have called for a ten year trimming of the Department of Health and Human Services’ budget through reconciliation that would average cuts of about $88 billion a year. Are they playing with the third rail?

One recent survey suggests that all voters, even Trump-supporting Republicans, would strongly object to any changes to the current program. But in states like Maine, instances of abuse Medicaid raise questions about the need for reform. The answer to how people think about Medicaid may be less clear-cut than the massive programs advocates suggest.

The Center for Excellence in Polling (CEP), a project of the conservative Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), raised a number of serious questions about the recent FabrizioWard poll claiming that there is “no appetite” for Medicaid reform “across the political spectrum” in a memo obtained by the Maine Wire.

The seven-page analysis details CEP’s critiques of the poll, focusing largely on concerns over the methodology employed by the prominent Republican pollster, including how questions were phrased and the order in which they were asked.