Dr. Oz Decided Cancer Isn’t Sick Enough for Medicaid 🤢😤

Mehmet Oz, the man Trump put in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, wrote a rule saying cancer isn’t enough to keep your Medicaid, and yesterday Justice Department lawyers went to a Boston courtroom to defend it.Congress put an exemption in last year’s big beautiful bullshit bill for people who are medically frail. Cancer, serious mental illness, disability. Oz’s agency took that list and added a second door. You have to be on the list, and prove it stops you from working eighty hours a month. Congratulations on your tumor, please proceed to the paperwork.This lands on people who already couldn’t get disability. Qualify for Medicaid as disabled and none of this touches you. The expansion population is everybody who didn’t clear that bar, and two thirds of first-time disability claims get denied. Deciding who’s too sick to work is what Social Security does. It takes them medical records, two years, and a judge. Now a Medicaid clerk does it over the phone.The government explained itself in writing, which was generous of them. Their brief says the exemptions are too broad, then gives an example, direct quote. Do asthmatics and diabetics have a serious or complex disorder if they are not functionally limited. Are you fecking kidding me. Lawyers for the United States filed a document worried that asthmatics might be pulling a fast one.Every state builds its own list of qualifying diagnoses. Why? The number two at the Center for Medicaid, on her own agency’s podcast. Would it have been great if we could have produced a whole list for them? Sure, that would have taken us a lot longer than the deadline. They were on a schedule. So fifty states get to guess. Nebraska’s guess runs three hundred pages.Nebraska went early, in May, and starts dropping people this week. Since launch the health department canceled every meeting it held with patient and provider groups. Hospitals asked how many had been denied and got nothing back.In Louisiana, Kathy Oubre runs the Pontchartrain Cancer Center. Her state won’t tell providers which patients are on expansion Medicaid, so she’s calling all of them. Her words: we are completely flying blind.The whole thing saves three hundred eighty-five billion dollars over ten years by cutting five million people loose. Except emergency rooms have to treat you anyway, so the bill doesn’t vanish, it moves. Safety net hospitals lose up to two point eight billion, and they run a third of the country’s level one trauma units. The savings go to the tax cuts. The costs go to whoever gets hit by a car.And diabetes and asthma are exactly the conditions where losing coverage is what makes you functionally limited. The insulin is the reason you can work. The inhaler is the reason you can work. Take the coverage and you manufacture the disability you just finished arguing they didn’t have.Sources:https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/28/trump-dems-court-battle-over-medicaid-work-requirements-01013114https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5946392-lawsuit-trump-medicaid-exemptions/https://www.statnews.com/2026/06/04/medicaid-work-requirements-final-rule-cancer-patients/https://ccf.georgetown.edu/2026/07/02/medicaid-work-reporting-requirements-states-ask-a-federal-court-to-protect-medically-frail-individuals-from-cms-overreach/https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2025/sep/impact-medicaid-work-requirements-hospital-revenues-margins Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe