Ron Johnson, the third-term Republican U.S. senator from Oshkosh, is using his new perch as chair of the Senate Budget Committee to spotlight rampant Medicaid spending and fraud.

Johnson this week showed the committee a graph that tracked annual federal spending, from $243 billion in the late 1990s to $441 billion just before the expansion of Obamacare in 2014 to $536 billion with the onset of COVID-19 in 2020.

Last year alone, the federal bill alone for Medicaid was $668 billion, more than 2.5 times the program’s total 30 years ago, Johnson said. Total Medicaid spending, including states’ shares, last year was more than $910 billion.

Overall spending by the federal and state governments on Medicaid has never once been reduced since Congress approved the program in 1965.

New scrutiny for Medicaid fraud