Democrats, meanwhile, blocking release of Medicaid enrollee information
Ron Johnson, the third-term Republican U.S. senator from Oshkosh, is using his new perch as chair of the Senate Budget Committee to spotlight rampant Medicaid spending and fraud.
Johnson this week showed the committee a graph that tracked annual federal spending, from $243 billion in the late 1990s to $441 billion just before the expansion of Obamacare in 2014 to $536 billion with the onset of COVID-19 in 2020.
Last year alone, the federal bill alone for Medicaid was $668 billion, more than 2.5 times the program’s total 30 years ago, Johnson said. Total Medicaid spending, including states’ shares, last year was more than $910 billion.
Overall spending by the federal and state governments on Medicaid has never once been reduced since Congress approved the program in 1965.
Johnson replaced South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham as chairman of the committee after Graham died last month. A day before the hearing, Johnson told the Badger Institute he saw an opportunity to spotlight Medicaid spending.
“It’s obviously out of control, and with all of the focus on the illegal fraud in places like California and Minnesota and the legal fraud with states gaming the system, we need to bring this information to the committee,” Johnson said.
“I hope we can reach some bipartisan agreement that this is out of control spending,” Johnson told the committee at the hearing Tuesday. “I’d like to think we can agree on common facts. The first step is to admit you have a problem.”
Brian Blase, president of the Paragon Health Institute, outlined at the hearing what he called “the legal fraud” in the current Medicaid system, with states encouraged by federal reimbursements for able bodied adults that are as much as seven times higher than those for children.
“The federal government encourages states to discriminate against the most vulnerable,” Blase said.
In 2024, 9.2 million of those able-bodied adults were likely ineligible for enrollment yet were enrolled by states anyhow at a cost to taxpayers of nearly $33 billion, according to a new study Blase shared with the committee.
In response, Andy Schneider, a research professor with the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, told the committee he did not believe states were trying to cheat the system.
Schneider has called the withholding of funds from states that do not police stealing from their Medicaid systems a “weaponization of fraud.”
Wisconsin is one of 21 states — all but one with Democratic governors — suing the federal government to block it from demanding they turn over Medicaid enrollee information to aid in fraud investigations.
The Gov. Tony Evers administration has said little about Medicaid fraud in the state, and its fraud prosecution record pales in comparison to the administration of previous governor, Scott Walker.
This week, Wisconsin Republican congressman Derrick Van Orden, at a law enforcement gathering with FBI Director Kash Patel in Eau Claire, asked for Evers’ help in fighting Medicaid fraud.
“I would implore Gov. Evers to put aside his politics,” Van Orden said, “because that’s all this is about, and turn over these rolls so that we can do the appropriate amount, from the executive branch, enforcement of this. Because fraud is taking place in the state of Wisconsin. Governor Evers knows it. That’s why he’s not releasing these lists.”
An emailed request seeking comment from Evers’ press office was not replied to by the time this story was published.
Democrats who testified Tuesday focused on the most vulnerable — children — and blamed the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” signed into law in July 2025, for tossing 2.3 million children and 8 million able-bodied adults off Medicaid.
None of the stipulations in the bill concerning Medicaid, including minimal work requirements for adults, however, will take effect until 2027.
Nearly all of the enrollment reductions in the past two years, which have not stopped spending increases, were achieved when President Biden called off the pandemic health emergency in April 2023. Prior to that, states had been forced to accept new enrollees without culling anyone who was no longer eligible.
As the Badger Institute has reported, when states were freed to enforce eligibility requirements, millions of recipients across the country fell off the Medicaid rolls. Wisconsin, however, was one of many states that ended up with enrollments far larger than before the health emergency was declared.
In the case of Wisconsin, 163,221 more enrollees were on Medicaid in 2024 than before the pandemic, at an annual taxpayer cost of at least $50 million.
As for the most vulnerable in the state, Medicaid was covering 458,299 children in June, about 75,000 more than the 383,701 covered in March 2020 before COVID, according to state Department of Health Services data.
With the end of the health emergency, the number of children on Medicaid dropped to 325,431 in January 2024, but by October 2025 it was up nearly 45 percent to a peak of 469,915, according to the DHS.
The state’s share of Wisconsin’s total bill — roughly 40 percent to the federal government’s 60 percent — is fast nearing a third of the state’s biennial budget. Total enrollment is 60,000 people higher than it was at the start of the pandemic.
Mark Lisheron is a contributing journalist of the Badger Institute.
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