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- Millions at Risk of Medicaid Loss if G.O.P. Wins Cuts
Millions at Risk of Medicaid Loss if G.O.P. Wins Cuts
A plan to pay for Trump tax breaks may shift burden to states
Matt Davis
February 26, 2025
Hey, friends. For those of you who are new here, I read the top story in the New York Times every morning so that you don’t have to. I really appreciate you subscribing, reading, and talking about the news. If you were forwarded this, you can subscribe here. I’m also doing a five-minute video version of this, each morning if you’d like to follow me on LinkedIn (you can always watch the recording later). And I get a shameless dollar if you subscribe to the Supercool newsletter below👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻 Thanks for your support! Now, let’s read the news!
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There were birds singing in the trees this morning, and my kid had a banana for breakfast.
This morning’s lead story by Noah Weiland and Sarah Cliff focuses on how House Republicans are looking for ways to pay for President Trump’s tax cuts, including cutting the federal government’s share of Medicaid Spending.
“Cutting medicaid spending could result in millions of Americans across the country losing health coverage, unless states decide to play a bigger role in its funding,” Weiland and Cliff report.
The story focuses on Jeannie Brown, a school bus driver in Belgrade, Montana, one of more than 21 million adults with medicaid coverage under state expansions, which are thanks to Obamacare.
“Ms. Brown, who makes around $25,000 a year, had been trapped in the so-called coverage gap, with a salary too high for Medicaid, and too low for a heavily subsidized Obama plan.”
After Montana lawmakers voted in 2015 to take up the Affordable Care Act’s option to expand Medicaid to cover more adults, Ms. Brown enrolled. She began to see a primary car doctor, and Medicaid paid for hand surgeries, knee replacements, a double mastectomy and her inhaler, she said.
“Being a caregiver is extremely exhausting, especially with someone who has a lot of health needs,” she said last week from a children’s hospital in Colorado, where her granddaughter had been flown for emergency care. “If I didn’t have the preventative care I needed, I’d be in a much worse place physically. I’d probably be disabled.”
The tricky thing about this story is that conservative critics of Medicaid expansion don’t think the federal government should be paying for people like Ms. Brown to have health care. The piece quotes the Libertarian Cato Institute saying it diverts money from more vulnerable populations, although looking at Ms. Brown in Janie Osborne’s photograph, you would hardly say she was a predator out to ruing vulnerable people’s lives. I believe, personally, that the Federal government should be supporting her.
Another wrinkle in the story is that Republicans are aware that slashing the programs would be hugely unpopular in rural areas which…tend to vote Republican. So while President Trump can slam Obamacare all he likes, and hate on the former president who created it, his congressional support is also dependent on maintaining these expansions as much as possible. Effectively it sets up a negotiation with the individual states over how much of the slack they’ll take up.
“Democratic legislators in Virginia are trying to protect Medicaid…State officials are also girding for a new wave of enrollment from laid-off federal workers.”
I pay $2,600 a month for health insurance for my family. I still support the federal medicaid expansion because I believe that in a fair and just society everyone is entitled to health care.
I also think it’s interesting that we tend to regard rural Americans as like caricatures out of the movie “Deliverance” but that’s inhumane and patronizing and it doesn’t help persuade them that urban elites don’t care about them. It also doesn’t prevent them from exercising the little power they have by voting for a president who would cut off their benefits in a heartbeat if only he thought he could get away with it.
Please talk to your friends and family about the news, and thanks for reading, as always!
Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.