The GOP scores a win in its long war on government health care
Republicans have battled government-funded health care since the day in 1965 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Medicaid and Medicare into law.
President Ronald Reagan cut the budget of both programs in 1981. President George W. Bush further trimmed Medicaid. In 1995, after taking over both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years, Republicans tried but failed to convert Medicaid into a set of block grants to the states and eliminate poor people's right to health insurance.
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