Seema Verma isn’t a well-known member of President Donald Trump’s administration, but she is an important one.

As the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, Verma is in charge of overseeing health programs that over 100 million Americans rely on.

So it seemed like an odd choice for Trump’s Medicare chief to call the proposal to expand Medicare coverage to more Americans scary in an attempted Halloween joke on Wednesday.

This year’s scariest Halloween costume goes to… pic.twitter.com/QtRbdmiR8T — Administrator Seema Verma (@SeemaCMS) October 31, 2018

Verma’s tweet, which quickly achieved ratio status, was followed by her promoting an interview with Sinclair “Chief Political Analyst” and Trump toady Boris Epshteyn, during which she explained why more Americans having health care coverage is “simply a bad idea.”

.@SeemaCMS believes that the Democrat-backed ‘Medicare For All’ is simply a bad idea. The focus of the agency? Strengthening the Medicare program itself. Watch our interview here: https://t.co/zKg8VAwwLQ — Boris Epshteyn (@BorisEP) October 31, 2018

Medicare for All is a universal health care proposal that would expand the current Medicare program to cover everyone regardless of age. Over a dozen Democratic senators, including a number of presumed 2020 presidential hopefuls, endorsed the Medicare For All plan introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in September 2017. A third of the Democrats in the House started a Medicare For All caucus in July.


Republicans have gone all out to try and discredit the popular health care proposal in advance of next week’s midterm elections (including a laughably false op-ed from Trump that struggled with basic facts), falsely claiming that universal health coverage “doesn’t work anywhere in the world,” saying the expansion of health coverage to more Americans would harm those who are already fortunate enough to have health coverage, running ads that imply Medicare For All would kill senior citizens, and just flat-out lying about their history on health care as a party.

Numerous Democrats have cited the popularity of Medicare For All on the campaign trail.