In March 2025, Ken Calvert tweeted that he was “committed to protecting Medicaid benefits for Americans who rely on the program.”

Four months later, he voted for a bill that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would leave 17 million Americans uninsured – including nearly 12 million kicked off Medicaid.

This wasn’t some abstract policy debate for Calvert’s district. More than two million Californians in Orange and Riverside Counties relied on Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program. Over 20 percent of those under 65 in his district – and over a third of the children – depended on it.

When constituents called his office in a panic after the February budget vote, Calvert’s message was: “It’s going to be fine, don’t panic.”

He claimed the budget agreement had “nothing to do with Medicaid” and contained “not one word of Medicaid in the bill.” NOTUS reported that the $880 billion in mandatory spending cuts required by the resolution would “almost certainly” necessitate Medicaid cuts. The New York Times did the math and reached the same conclusion: even cutting everything else to zero wouldn’t fill the gap.

When the final bill arrived, Calvert defended the Medicaid cuts on local news, calling 20-hour work requirements for able-bodied adults “not too much to ask.”

This wasn’t Calvert’s first time going after health coverage. In 2017, he voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, calling it a fulfilled campaign promise. That bill would have cut Medicaid by $834 billion over ten years. He also defended the Senate’s ACA repeal bill, claiming that “massive expansions of expensive government programs like Medicaid are simply not fiscally sustainable.”

Nearly two million Californians were enrolled in ACA marketplace plans. Two million more relied on Medi-Cal in his backyard. And Ken Calvert voted to undermine both.

“Don’t panic,” he said. Easy for him to say.