Republican Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers speaks during an election night watch party, Nov. 5, 2024, at Suburban Showplace Collection in Novi, Mich. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File)

During a radio interview last week, Michigan Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Mike Rogers repeated the widely debunked lie that President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) tax law will not kick citizens off Medicaid.

During an interview on “Michigan’s Big Show Starring Michael Patrick Shiels” on Oct. 13, Shiels brought up congressional Democrats’ attempt to leverage the current federal government shutdown to reverse the deep cuts the OBBB makes to Medicaid. Democrats note if the Medicaid cuts go through, millions of U.S. citizens nationally would lose Medicaid coverage.

“And they keep making — they keep restating, ‘Oh no, Medicaid is going to go—’ That’s not true,” Rogers responded to Shiels. “We are here to protect it for people who should have it: children, pregnant women, seniors. I mean, that is what the program was designed for.”

This is false, according to multiple nonpartisan experts. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated in an August report that 7.5 million people are projected to lose health coverage through Medicaid through 2034. And the health care nonprofit organization KFF estimates 260,000 of those will be from Rogers’ home state of Michigan. These numbers are similar to estimated cuts other projections found before Republicans passed the OBBB into law. Rogers publicly signaled support for the OBBB while Congress debated it.

Throughout his previous congressional career, Rogers voted 14 times from 2003-15 to weaken Medicaid, according to a Heartland Signal analysis. Notable votes include a 2003 vote on a budget bill to cut $92 billion from Medicaid, one in 2011 to cut Medicaid by $700 million via turning the system into a block grant program and one favoring a budget bill in 2013 that would have cut Medicaid by 45%.

Rogers is not the first major Senate candidate nationally to repeat this lie. Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) told the lie to FOX 8 News in Cleveland last month, despite almost 290,000 Ohioans being projected to lose Medicaid coverage, according to the KFF analysis. And U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA), challenging Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) in Georgia’s Senate race, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in July the same thing, even when Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee found in June that over 650,000 Georgians could love coverage. Both men voted for the OBBB.