Congressman John Faso continues his attack on Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the way the state handles the Medicaid program.

In response to an announcement that medical professionals were participating in panel discussions around the state to discuss the negative impacts of the healthcare bills being concocted by the House and Senate in Washington, DC, Faso attacked again.

He said in an email, “In the 19th Congressional District, more than $224 million is handed over from property taxpayers to pay for Cuomo’s Medicaid program. A typical homeowner pays between $350 and $500 per year for Cuomo’s mandated Medicaid costs.

“Rather than trimming his own bloated $160 billion budget, Cuomo insists on sticking it to homeowners, helping to drive more people from New York State. Over 30% of New Yorkers are on Medicaid, and our state’s Medicaid program costs over $60 billion each year—that’s more than Texas and Florida combined.”

It is true that New York is one of only two states that ask counties to pay a share of Medicaid, and it is also true that New York has some relatively generous programs. But the question we would ask Faso is: which of those programs would you cut?

At a gathering of healthcare professionals at Catksill Regional Medical Center on June 26, Caren Fairweather, executive director of the Maternal-Infant Services Network, spoke. The goal of her organization for the past 20 years has been to get prenatal care to every pregnant woman, especially women who could not afford it in a five-county region. The result of the effort is that in the region, the infant mortality rate has been cut in half. Fairweather said 75% of the people enrolled in the program do so through Medicaid. Is this a program that should be cut?

Another health professional on the panel was the vice president of education and public affairs for Planned Parenthood of Mid-Hudson Valley, Fran Fox-Pizzonia. Her organization delivers birth control, pregnancy tests, screenings for sexually transmitted disease to some 20,000 women in the region—as well as, yes, abortions— and it reaches another 25,000 through educational outreach.

At least in part because of the work of Planned Parenthood, unintended pregnancies are at an all-time low, and teen pregnancies are down. Medicaid pays for services for 60% of the woman they serve. Is it really an intelligent or compassionate decision to cut Medicaid funding from this organization, as the Senate version o the health care law would do?

Also on the panel was David Gerber, director of counseling services for St. Christopher’s Inn, a facility that temporarily houses adult men in crisis. These days, that means housing a lot of men who are addicted to heroin or opioids. The average stay for an addict at the facility is 83 days, which Gerber said allows for more effective treatment than can be found in many places.

Gerber said that a recent survey of addicts who had left the facility a year earlier found that 90% of them were still “clean and sober.” He said that the “vast majority of substance-abusing clients at St. Christopher’s Inn are enrolled in Medicaid.” At a time when the addiction crisis in the United States has claimed more lives than the Vietnam War—an estimated 65,000 in 2016 alone—is this really a good time to pull Medicaid dollars away from addicts?

So the first question for Congressman Faso is: which Medicaid services, specifically, would you deny to New York State residents in need?

The second question is: what more important needs would be addressed by the funding?

The answer to that question, for both the House version of the healthcare bill and the Senate version, was answered by Paul Francis, the deputy secretary for Health and Human Services in Albany. He said, “Almost $850 billion in Medicaid cuts and reduction in subsidies to individual insurance is... going to pay for tax cuts for the medical industry and the wealthiest Americans.”

We can only assume that Faso believes it’s more important to support his wealthiest donors such as billionaire hedge fund managers Robert Mercer and Paul Singer than it is to support the pregnant women, drug addicts, the poor and the elderly in his district.