{"id":71618,"date":"2025-03-28T16:41:19","date_gmt":"2025-03-28T23:41:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=71618"},"modified":"2025-03-28T16:41:19","modified_gmt":"2025-03-28T23:41:19","slug":"with-largest-ever-medicaid-cuts-79-million-americans-face-health-care-loss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=71618","title":{"rendered":"With Largest-Ever Medicaid Cuts, 79 Million Americans Face Health Care Loss"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Selen Ozturk<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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With the House proposing the largest Medicaid cuts in the program\u2019s history, the health care of 79.3 million enrollees is at stake.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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With the House proposing the largest Medicaid cuts in the program\u2019s history, the health care of 79.3 million enrollees is at stake.<\/p>\n

The budget\u00a0resolution<\/a>\u00a0to slash at least $880 billion through 2034 in health care and nutrition programs was proposed to the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee in late February, and the House is poised to vote on the measure in late April.<\/p>\n

Of the nearly one in four Americans enrolled in the Medicaid and Children\u2019s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) \u2014 including low-income people, pregnant women, seniors and people with disabilities \u2014 the measure would feasibly eliminate coverage for 15.9 million.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe magnitude of the cuts is extraordinary. Nothing in American history has been remotely this size,\u201d said Stan Dorn, director of the Health Policy Project at\u00a0UnidosUS<\/a>, at a Friday, March 21 Ethnic Media Services briefing about the Medicaid measures.<\/p>\n

The closest previous cuts, under the Reagan administration in 1981 and 1982, were a $3.9 billion dollar slash that dropped enrollment 13%; in today\u2019s terms, this would translate to $12.4 billion and 9 million people.<\/p>\n

In 2023, total Medicaid spending was about $860 million; were the cuts to be implemented, each congressional district nationwide would lose an average $2 billion in federal funds over nine years.<\/p>\n

The April measure \u201cpassed by a single, party-line vote,\u201d said Dorn. \u201cEvery Republican but one voted for it, every Democrat voted against it. Most bills now have to get 60 votes in the Senate to pass, which means you need Democratic and Republican support, but budget reconciliation has a \u2018fast-track\u2019 procedure where bills can pass entirely by Republican votes alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no way you can cut huge amounts like this from Medicaid without hurting millions of people, he continued. \u201cThe reason Republicans are doing this is because the Trump 2017 tax cuts that primarily benefited large corporations in the wealthy will expire after this year, unless they can pay the nearly $5 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, to continue it \u2026 This is the exact opposite of what was promised to the American people \u2026 Leaving people subject to medical bills without the protection of insurance means costs go up, not down.\u201d<\/p>\n

House Speaker Mike Johnson has said the plan is to vote on a budget bill on the House floor by Easter, April 20 and have it on the president\u2019s desk by Memorial Day, May 26.<\/p>\n

Cut implementation strategies discussed by House members include ending or limiting states\u2019 ability to raise their share of Medicaid funds by taxing insurance companies and hospitals; capping the total amount of federal money that a state may get per enrollee; and terminating Medicaid for enrollees who don\u2019t meet work requirements.<\/p>\n

\u201cMedicaid is the largest source of federal funds coming into states,\u201d said Joan Alker, executive director of the\u00a0Center for Children and Families and Research<\/a>\u00a0and professor at the Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy Foundation. \u201cEven a state that wanted to will not be able to raise taxes enough to make up for these large federal cuts \u2026 this will have ripple effects on all areas of state budgets, not just Medicaid.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cStates will be faced with pitting very, very vulnerable populations against one another \u2014 an aging population who needs long-term care, children, people with disabilities, low-income families,\u201d she continued.<\/p>\n

Approximately 72.1 million Americans are currently enrolled in Medicaid and 7.2 million in CHIP \u2014 including over 37 million children (roughly half of all children in the U.S.), 20 million Latinos, 13 million Black people, 4.8 million Asian Americans and 700,000 Native Americans.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are hearing a lot about cutting fraud. But if you want to address fraud, and you look at where fraud occurs, people who are enrolled in Medicaid are the victims, not the perpetrators,\u201d Alker explained. \u201cProposals that limit people\u2019s access are not addressing fraud. Proposals to address fraud would include hiring more prosecutors at the Department of Justice and beefing up Medicaid Fraud Control Units. These are not proposals to address fraud, they are proposals to cut Medicaid.\u201d<\/p>\n

The impact of these cuts will especially be felt by community health centers, which serve 32.5 million people \u2014 often, the Medicaid enrollees and uninsured patients who already struggle to access care the most.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith cuts, you\u2019ll probably see health centers forced to reduce operating hours, cut key programs, not hire new staff,\u201d said Joanne Preece, director of government and external affairs at the Community Clinic Association of Los Angeles County, representing 66 health center organizations and two million patients countywide.<\/p>\n

Medicaid is the largest source of funding for health centers nationwide, accounting for 43% of a total $46.7 billion in revenue.<\/p>\n

Roughly\u00a0half<\/a>\u00a0of health center patients are on Medicaid.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Medicaid expansion \u201chas a dramatic impact on our patients\u2019 ability to access care,\u201d Preece explained. \u201cIn a little over a decade since the Affordable Care Act and further expansions we\u2019ve done in California, health center patients in Los Angeles County went from majority uninsured to majority insured.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2011, 58% of LA County health center patients were uninsured; in 2023, 14% were.<\/p>\n

Preece added that \u201cour \u2018three-legged stool\u2019 Medicaid cuts will harm the health of patients through the entire system. When patients are uninsured, they\u2019re more likely to minimize or delay care, they have fears related to costs, and this leads to worse health outcomes in the long run. It leads to folks relying on emergency rooms for care, which isn\u2019t good for anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

A recent\u00a0KFF poll<\/a>\u00a0suggests that two-thirds of adult Americans \u201csay that someone close to them has received help from Medicaid at some point, including over half (53%) who say either they themselves or a member of their family has been covered by the program.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same poll found that \u201cvery favorable\u201d or \u201csomewhat favorable\u201d views of Medicaid were held by majorities of Democrat (88%), Republican (64%) and Independent (81%) respondents.<\/p>\n

\u201cLast November, people voted with their wallets, seeking greater affordability, including for health care, but the cuts proposed would shred our safety net, forcing families to lose coverage and access to health care and shifting costs onto people who are already struggling with costs for everything else,\u201d said Anthony Wright, executive director of\u00a0Families USA<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of this, to fund a tax cut geared toward the wealthiest corporations, is a cut to the health care system that serves all of us,\u201d he continued, \u201cwhether it\u2019s your local hospital forced to shut down its ER or add hours to its wait times or scale back services, or community clinics and long-term facilities that already may not be able to keep their doors open.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThese Medicaid cuts will be felt by people in every state and every congressional district in the nation, regardless of our race, ethnicity, party, health provider or how we get covered,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BySelen Ozturk Mar 26, 2025 With...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71618"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71619,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71618\/revisions\/71619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}