As Texas hospitals learned this week that the Trump administration was currently holding up their $10 billion in Medicaid payments, the state’s attorney general and U.S. Senate hopeful Ken Paxton was noticeably silent.
Three years ago, Paxton’s office was quick to come to the state’s defense when the Biden administration threatened to withhold the same type of Medicaid funding to hospitals called the Comprehensive Hospital Increase Reimbursement Program, also known as CHIRP. If Texas’ payment that year had been disallowed, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services could have withheld all the CHIRP funding that year, which is the same problem Texas is facing this year.
