Kamala Harris says Donald Trump ‘intends to cut’ Medicare. This ignores Trump’s repeated pledges.

On the campaign trail, both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have painted former President Donald Trump as a threat to Medicare, the federal health insurance program for all Americans older than 65. 

A little more than a week after becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee, Harris said during a July 30 rally in Atlanta, "Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare."

We previously rated Harris’ comments about Trump cutting Social Security Mostly False. Here, we’ll examine her statement about Medicare.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump has repeatedly said he would not cut Medicare. 

As president, though, Trump regularly proposed policies that would have reduced Medicare spending. Policy experts disagree about whether Medicare beneficiaries would have borne the brunt of those cuts.

"It’s difficult to know with any certainty what Donald Trump’s agenda for Medicare would be, given the lack of specificity in his platform and the vagueness of phrases like ‘strengthen Medicare’ and ‘protect Medicare,’" said Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the program on Medicare policy at KFF, a health care policy think tank. "While his campaign platform rules out cuts to Medicare, that could still leave the door open for changes to Medicare that might not look like cuts but that would fundamentally transform the defined-benefit nature of the program." 

Defined-benefit programs automatically pay member benefits. In defined-contribution plans, the opposite happens —  beneficiaries receive a fixed amount of money from which they must cover all their costs, even if that means members may pay excess costs out of pocket.

In his 2024 campaign, Trump has made clear that his Medicare policy is to make no cuts.

On Jan. 20, 2023, as part of a series of policy statements called Agenda 47, Trump posted, "Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security."

He reiterated this stance in the Republican Party platform released earlier this year. In the platform summary, he promised to "fight for and protect Social Security and Medicare with no cuts." The party’s full platform document added that the goal is to "protect Medicare, and ensure seniors receive the care they need without being burdened by excessive costs."

When contacted for comment, Harris’ campaign pointed PolitiFact to a variety of proposals for Medicare then-president Trump included in his annual budget proposals, some of which can be characterized as cuts. As with many presidential budget proposals, generally, Trump’s Medicare proposals were not enacted.

As president, Trump submitted four successive proposed budgets, covering fiscal years 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. Trump proposed eliminating Medicare State Health Insurance Assistance Programs, which advise Medicare recipients on how to sign up for benefits and manage billing disputes. He also proposed raising premiums and charging beneficiaries more for prescription drugs under Medicare Part D; and limiting payments to nursing homes and home health agencies.

"Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare," Harris campaign spokesperson Joseph Costello told PolitiFact. "Trump’s own record makes clear that he will gut critical benefits for millions of Americans if he takes power."

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However, other policies Trump advocated for were aimed at curbing spending on providers, not reducing patients’ benefits. This broad goal, and sometimes these specific proposals, have often received bipartisan support.

"In general, these proposals are in areas where there is evidence we pay providers too much," Matthew Fiedler, of the Brookings Institution Center for Health Policy, told PolitiFact in 2019. 

In analyzing Trump’s fiscal year 2021 budget proposal, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget — a group supporting lower deficits — concluded that Trump’s Medicare policies that year "would not represent reductions in benefits, but instead reductions in cost for roughly the same level of benefits." On balance, the group said that Trump’s policies "would actually reduce costs for individuals by lowering premiums and out-of-pocket costs."

Project 2025 is a 922-page policy guide for an incoming Republican administration assembled by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, along with other conservative groups. 

Democrats have sought to link Project 2025 to Trump, and while the former president has expressed views that align with some of the project’s policy proposals, Project 2025 is distinct from Trump’s official campaign positions and from the Republican Party platform. Trump has rebutted efforts to tie him to it.

The blueprint, published in 2023, says it would make the privately run Medicare option, called Medicare Advantage, the default choice for beneficiaries; increase competitive bidding for services; and ease regulations on prescription drugs, hospice care and medical savings accounts.

Experts told PolitiFact that if Trump followed these recommendations, it would not necessarily result in cuts for beneficiaries.

"Policymakers and researchers disagree on whether the reforms outlined in the Project 2025 report would work, and whether there could be adverse consequences," said Christine Eibner, a senior economist on health care policy for Rand, a think tank. She added that the same could be said about the policy efforts proposed by the Biden administration.

"While such changes would aim to cut spending, they wouldn’t necessarily reduce beneficiaries’ access to care — although the devil is in the details," Eibner said.

Joe Antos, a senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said the specific policies urged by Project 2025 are largely in line with past ideas to make Medicare more efficient.

"Simplistic claims from either party about Medicare or their opponent's plans are not useful and generally are misleading," Antos said.

Harris said Trump "intends to cut" Medicare.

Trump has made clear in speeches and written policy documents during the 2024 campaign that he has no plans to cut Medicare.

The Harris campaign points to Trump’s four successive annual budgets in which he proposed policies that could be described as cutting Medicare. However, experts disagree about whether those cuts would have hurt beneficiaries had they been enacted. Some of Trump’s proposed cuts were aimed at curbing spending on providers, a goal that has bipartisan support.

We rate the statement Mostly False.