Republicans Once Maligned Medicaid. Now Some See A Program Too Big To Touch

Every time a baby is born in Louisiana, where Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson handily won reelection last year, there's more than a 60 chance taxpayers will finance the birth through Medicaid .

In Republican Rep. David Valadao 's central California district, 6 out of 10 people use Medicaid to pay for doctor visits and emergency room trips.

And one-third of the population is covered by Medicaid in GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski's Alaska, one of the nation's costliest corners for health care.

Each of these Republicans - and some of their conservative colleagues - lined up last week to defend Medicaid, in a departure from long-held GOP policies. Republicans, who already have ruled out massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare, are turning their attention to siphoning as much as 880 billion from Medicaid over the next decade to help finance 4.5 trillion in tax cuts.

But as a deadline to avoid a partial government shutdown nears, hesitation is surfacing among Washington's Republican lawmakers - once reliable critics of lofty government social welfare programs such as Medicaid - who say that deep cuts to the health care program could prove too untenable for people back home.