How ABC News Manufactures a Medicaid Cut Crisis
6th October 2025
The federal government is shut down, at least in part, because Democrats are attempting to reverse Medicaid spending cuts that were enacted earlier this year as part of the “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” Democrats are refusing to support a continuing resolution that would keep funding the government unless it restores those cuts.
ABC News is determined to help the Democrats make their case for reversing Medicaid cuts, even at the expense of whatever journalistic credibility it has remaining. To wit, “Good Morning America” aired a story by senior White House correspondent Selina Wang about “looming Medicaid cuts threatening the already dire maternal health system.”
The story claims that more than 5.5 million women already live in “maternity care deserts,” referencing a 2024 report by the March of Dimes, and argues that Medicaid cuts “could force more maternity wards to shut down.”
Almost everything about this story is factually incorrect or severely misleading. First, the factual errors. The March of Dimes report claims that 2.3 million women live in maternity deserts, less than half the 5.5 million asserted by ABC News. ABC may have calculated 5.5 million by adding the 3 million women identified by the March of Dimes who “live in counties with limited maternity care access” to the 2.3 million women who they say live in counties classified as maternity care deserts. Even then, ABC appears not to know its 123s because the sum of 3 and 2.3 is not more than 5.5.