NY-24 Rep. Claudia Tenney illustrates George Orwell's point as she lies through her teeth about Medicaid enrollment

 

But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head.

For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions.

Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.

--George Orwell, 1984

As I noted on January 19, 2025:

...While I'll continue to report on and analyze this data as I have been for the past decade, if it comes from the Trump Administration I'll have no choice but to start adding "Trump Admin claims..." to any headline or story lede going forward.

Yesterday on FOX Business, (starting at 4:10 in the clip above):

Tenney: "Most of our budget is mandatory spending, so when we talk about CRs and all this other stuff that we're doing today, with some anomalies to defend the Dept. of Defense, we're talking about discretionary spending, which we control, which is less than...I think it's like 75 - 80% is mandatory and the rest is discretionarey, so most of it...we need to attack the spending side...and by the way, Anna's right; fraud, abuse & waste is the problem. Look at the entitlements that we have in New York State for example: 8 million people in the state of New York are on Medicaid. Only 5 million are eligible. That's a $20 billion a year hit for taxpayers of New York, but also federal taxpayers pay for that because the money comes from the federal government and is split half & half with the state, so the taxpayers are taking a hit on the federal side and the state side.

This is bullshit, plain and simple.

The highest total Medicaid and CHIP enrollment has ever been combined in New York State was 7.63 million people, and that was back in June 2023...nearly two years ago, at the tail end of the COVID Public Health Emergency period, when people started to have their eligibility redetermined (as laid out by the Continuous Coverage provisions of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) and the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023.

Since then, Medicaid/CHIP enrollment has dropped down to less than 6.7 million people (as of September 2024), and it dropped slightly more to 6.65 million in New York State as of October 2024.

If you look at Medicaid only, total enrollment in NY peaked at 7.1 million in June 2023 and had dropped to just under 6.0 million as of October 2024, the most current month for which federal data is available (CHIP is sometimes included, sometimes not, so I won't quibble about that one).

In other words, Tenney's "8 million" claim is overstating NY Medicaid enrollment by either 20% or 33% depending on whether you're willing to give her the benefit of the doubt about including CHIP (Child Health Plus) enrollment in that total.

What about since October? Is it possible that NY Medicaid/CHIP enrollment suddenly skyrocketed again in the past 5 months?

Well, federal data isn't available on that yet, but according to NY State itself, as of January 2025 it had gone up slightly, to exactly 6,939,731 people...still over a million shy of the "8 million" falsely claimed by Rep. Tenney.

Even then it's worth noting that NY State data seems to run slightly higher than CMS; for instance, in October 2024 NY State reported enrollment as 7,020,550 while CMS reported it as 6,652,419. I assume the discrepancy has to do with how enrollment is reported: "At any time during the month" vs. "as of the 1st of the month" since there's a high churn rate in Medicaid/CHIP programs.

Again, it's hypothetically possible that NY Medicaid enrollment has magically leapt by 15% in just the past 2 months, but I seriously doubt it. Hell, even in the graph above, the steepest 2-month increase in NY Medicaid enrollment on record was during the early days of the COVID pandemic when it went up 4.3% from April - June 2020.

Regardless of any of the above, Rep. Tenney offers absolutely no evidence, much less any source, for her claim that "only 5 million of them (NY Medicaid enrollees) are eligible."

As for her claim of the "3 million" Medicaid enrollees who are "ineligible" costing NY taxpayers "$20 billion per year," according to the NY State Comptroller, total NY Medicaid enrollment cost $101.5 billion in 2024. Assuming Medicaid cost exactly the same for every enrollee (it actually varies widely by population...children cost much less on average than adults, etc), that would actually be more like $38 billion per year, or nearly twice as much as Tenney claims. You'd think she would have gone for the higher figure there since it makes her case sound even stronger.

So, where did she get her "$20 billion" figure? Beats me...probably from the same place she got the "3 million are ineligible" number: Out of her gluteal region.

On the upside, by overstating NY Medicaid enrollment by either 20% or 33% (depending on your POV re. CHIP being included), Tenney could come back a year from now and claim that DOGE has magically reduced enrollment by 20-33% even if they don’t kick a single person off the program!

On the downside, they could also kick EVERYONE off of Medicaid while claiming to have increased enrollment 40%...and without any accurate data to compare against, who's to say?

Put another way, if Elon Musk and his DOGE TechBros are successful at completely purging all accurate government data archives, a future Winston Smith could easily publish something like the following a few years from now:

For example, RFK Jr's MAHA forecast had estimated Medicaid enrollment at 50 million people. The actual output was given as 60 million. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure up to 70 million, so as to allow for the usual claim that Musk's DOGE "savings" had reduced Medicaid enrollment by 20 million people. In any case, 60 million was no nearer the truth than 50 million, or than 70 millions.

Very likely no one was still enrolled in Medicaid. Likelier still, nobody knew how many were enrolled, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter the United States claimed to have the healthiest population in the world, while perhaps half the public had the measles or polio.

And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.