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Medicaid Enrollment

What portion of the U.S. population is regularly enrolled in Medicaid, the federal government’s primary healthcare program for low-income people?

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The average portion of the U.S. population receiving Medicaid benefits for the entire year increased from 2% in 1966 to 26% in 2024. During this period, the poverty rate has stayed between 11% and 15%. Beyond year-round coverage, Medicaid also provides certain services to people who are not eligible for standard Medicaid coverage, like nursing homes for middle-income adults and childbirths for illegal immigrants. Thus, Medicaid pays for about 36% of all nursing home spending in the U.S. and 42% of all childbirths. Starting in late 2026, the One Big Beautiful Bill cuts Medicaid benefits to illegal immigrants, other aliens, and able-bodied adults who don’t work at least 20 hours per week, care for children, or get an education.

DocumentationMedicaid Enrollment Medicaid Spending BBB Medicaid Changes

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Buying Elections

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I–VT) claims that “we must end Citizens United” because “democracy must be 1 person, 1 vote — not billionaires buying elections.”

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IN FACT, Sanders is lobbying to undercut the First Amendment and empower selected billionaires, free speech isn’t “buying elections,” and Sanders actually buys elections by unconstitutionally bribing voters with taxpayers’ money. Here are the specifics:

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law” “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
In 2002, the vast bulk of Democrats in the House and Senate voted for a bill that generally banned corporations from mentioning the names of political candidates in broadcast communications prior to elections while making media corporations exempt from this law.
Per the Cornell Legal Information Institute, “Despite the popular misunderstanding, the right to freedom of the press guaranteed by the First Amendment is not very different from the right to freedom of speech,” and the First Amendment “does not afford members of the media any special rights or privileges not afforded to citizens in general.”
The Democrats’ 2002 bill — which was opposed by the vast majority of Republicans but signed into law by Republican President George W. Bush — restricted American citizens from pooling their resources to express their political views while allowing domestic and foreign billionaires to advance theirs by purchasing stakes in massive media corporations.
For example, the law didn’t prohibit Mexican multi-billionaire Carlos Slim — one of the world’s richest people — from becoming the largest single shareholder of the New York Times Company or loaning it $250 million when the corporation “looked to be in peril.”
In the 2010 case of Citizens United v. FEC, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “differential treatment of media corporations and other corporations cannot be squared with the First Amendment,” “all speakers” use “money amassed from the economic marketplace to fund their speech,” and the “First Amendment protects the resulting speech.”
In the Citizens United ruling, all of the justices appointed by Democrats voted to abridge the speech of U.S. citizens, and all but one of the justices appointed by Republicans voted to protect it.
Sanders and the Democrats he caucuses with have incessantly offered people more taxpayer-funded social benefits in exchange for their votes.
Per an academic paper published by Cambridge University Press, “Recipients of social benefits” are “more likely to punish politicians for cutbacks than taxpayers are to reward them for lower costs.”
In the latest presidential and congressional election cycles (2021–2024), federal candidates and political action committees spent a combined total of $23.7 billion to influence federal elections.
During the same period, the federal government spent 743 times that amount — $17.6 trillion — on social programs that confiscate money from taxpayers and redistribute it, thus bribing the beneficiaries to vote for politicians who enact these programs.
The father of the Constitution and primary author of the Bill of Rights, James Madison, wrote that the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution only permits the federal government to exercise the “particular powers” specified by the Constitution, such as coining money, issuing patents, and establishing post offices, not creating social programs.
Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and the founder whom Democrats invoke when calling for “separation of church and state,” wrote that the federal government doesn’t have “unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated” in the Constitution.
Until Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt threatened in 1937 to pack the Supreme Court with six added justices, the Court commonly ruled that the federal government doesn’t have the power to establish social programs.
From 1960 to 2024, social programs grew from 21% of all federal spending to 60%, and Sanders and the Democrats are pushing to greatly increase such spending.

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