President-elect Donald Trump has mostly been mum since the election about the promise he made to protect Social Security and Medicare in their current form.
"Every Republican wants to do a big number on Social Security, they want to do it on Medicare, they want to do it on Medicaid, and we can't do that because it's not fair to the people who have been paying in for years," said Trump at one point during his campaign.
Similar to his threats of imposing big tariffs on U.S. companies that send jobs to other countries, Trump's support for entitlement programs does not align with the ideology of leading Republicans in Congress.
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In fact, it was only days after Trump's election that Speaker Paul Ryan announced plans to push for the transformation of Medicare from an entitlement to government-run health care to a "premium-support" system in which seniors would receive a sum of money to help them purchase private plans.
While Trump has not responded to Ryan's plan, many of the people he has picked to join his administration have a history of supporting privatization or more market-based approaches to health care policy, a fact Democrats say shows Trump has no intention of sticking by many of his populist campaign promises.
"My guess is that Ryan's going to put a lot of effort into trying to persuade Trump through Mike Pence and Reince Priebus and others," says Peter Wehner, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, in an interview with The Hill.
Wehner adds that if Trump opposes the plan, however, it will be unlikely that Ryan will fight the new president on the issue. That's because Ryan would find himself not only fighting against a wing of the GOP, but against a united Democratic opposition. Passing a bill in that context — let alone a veto-proof bill — would be highly unlikely.
Democrats are already gearing up the fight to put pressure on the new president to keep his word on Medicare. On Wednesday, Democratic Congressional leaders held a press conference to highlight a petition with more than a million signatures urging Trump to preserve the program.
At around the same time, Bernie Sanders, linking to a video of Trump making his promise to maintain entitlements, tweeted the following to the president-elect: "You told seniors and working people you were on their side. Millions of us are going to demand you keep your promise."
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