Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) made a slip of the tongue during a CNBC interview Tuesday that has many people on social media wondering if he just said the quiet part out loud.
It happened after host Rebecca Quick asked the Louisiana Republican and former physician how his party planned to pay for the trillion-dollar tax cuts President Donald Trump desires.
After Quick noted that the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says the cuts would also cut revenue by as much as $11.2 trillion over the next decade, Cassidy insisted that the president doesn’t want to touch Medicare and Medicaid.
“What he means is not don’t go after things which was inappropriate spending. He’s saying, don’t cut benefits to beneficiaries,” he said, before suggesting those programs need to be analyzed with an approach similar to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
“Let’s bring that approach not to just what DOGE is doing, discretionary spending, but let’s look at Medicare.”
Then he made an inconvenient slip of the tongue when he rhetorically asked, “Is there some way that we can cut Medicare so that it’s, excuse me, reform Medicare so the benefits stay the same, but that its less expensive, more efficient?”
He added, “I would say that there is, and that’s where our opportunity lies.”
A spokesman for the senator insisted to HuffPost that “Cassidy wants to eliminate inefficiencies in Medicare and Medicaid Advantage,” but “as a doctor, his focus is improving health outcomes, which is why he unequivocally opposes benefit cuts.”
It’s possible that Cassidy intended to say “reform” from the beginning, but many people on social media thought he actually made a gaffe, the term used when a politician accidentally tells the truth.
In addition, many of Cassidy’s fellow party members seem quite OK with making drastic cuts to programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
As a result, many people accused Cassidy of saying the quiet part out loud, including two of his Senate colleagues.
Others also chimed in with their suspicions.
