Jacob Gardenswartz | (TNS) KFF Health News “As vice president, Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to cut, as you know, Medicare by $273 billion. She cast a vote to cut Medicare.” — Former President Donald Trump at a July 24 campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina.
____ During a July 24 campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, former President Donald Trump claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris was responsible for passing legislation in the U.S. Senate to cut Medicare spending by nearly $300 billion.
“As vice president, Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to cut, as you know, Medicare by $273 billion,” Trump told rally attendees. “She cast a vote to cut Medicare.” Trump gave no further explanation for which vote he was referring to or how he arrived at that figure.
A campaign spokesperson told KFF Health News in an email that Trump was referring to a statistic from a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Tomas Philipson, a University of Chicago economist and a former Trump administration official. Philipson’s op-ed argued that the Inflation Reduction Act — a sweeping climate and health care measure passed in 2022 for which Harris cast the tie-breaking vote — would harm Medicare patients by driving up costs. His article cited a Congressional Budget Office analysis showing that the measure’s health care provisions would reduce the federal deficit by $237 billion over 10 years.
“(M)ost of that reduction comes from the program spending less on .