There isn’t a Congressional Budget Office score that tells us how much the latest Trumpcare bill the Senate is flirting with will cut from Medicaid, but earlier estimates peg the cuts at $180 billion over ten years, increasing rapidly over time and reaching more than $40 billion annually by 2026.
Here’s what the Medicaid provisions in the bill look like, via the Health Affairs blog:
The principal federal Medicaid funding reduction provisions included in the new proposal are:
- a one-year elimination of federal funding for all Medicaid-covered services furnished by Planned Parenthood;
- an end to federal funding of retroactive Medicaid eligibility, a basic safety-net feature of the program since 1965 that enables states and health care providers to cover the cost of health care for catastrophically ill people who were eligible but not enrolled at the time they experienced a high-cost event, whether illness or injury; and,
- a permanent one-third reduction (phased in between FY 2021 and FY 2026) in the amount of matching funds for the traditional program that states can generate through lawful provider taxes.
The funding reductions in traditional Medicaid also include the earlier BCRA cap on the federal contribution to the traditional Medicaid program that CBO already has estimated will result in enormous federal funding reductions by holding spending well below the projected growth rate.
That means the loss of coverage for millions, and it means enormous pains for states. That’s one reason even Republican governors oppose it. It hurts children. It hurts pregnant women. It hurts the elderly. It hurts veterans. It hurts the disabled. It hurts the working poor. That’s entirely on purpose, by the way, and more than one Republican has to be thinking about how they’ll have all that money now for tax cuts for the rich.
JAM THE PHONE LINES. Call your senator at (202) 224-3121 and tell them to just stop playing with our lives. (After you call, please tell us how it went.)
