Opinion: Trump’s budget won’t be ‘big, beautiful’ for Medicaid recipients
The Medicaid work requirements in the House bill mirror Georgia’s state program, which has prevented many for obtaining coverage.
Last week the House passed President Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which extends the 2017 Trump tax cuts, including tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and will result in $700 billion in cuts to Medicaid over the next 10 years to offset the costs.
According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the cuts will result in 8.6 million Americans losing their health insurance. Republicans claim that the savings are only coming from “waste, fraud, and abuse” and they are generating savings by imposing new work requirements for Medicaid eligibility.
But don’t be fooled, we’ve seen this story play out at the state level before. The Medicaid work requirements in the House bill mirror Georgia’s “Pathways to Coverage” program, and we already have results showing how Georgia’s work rules have prevented its poorest residents from obtaining health insurance.
Georgia’s program, like the federal proposal, requires 80 hours of work or volunteer activities each month as a condition of obtaining and keeping coverage. It’s estimated that 240,000 Georgians would be eligible for Pathways to Coverage, but one year into the program only 5,500 were actually covered.
Interested applicants have encountered application backlogs, excessive paperwork, and complex rules which have left people waiting for coverage after they applied and led many others to not even try applying.
On the federal level, now that the Department of Health and Human Services has been thoroughly DOGEd by Elon Musk, who will even be left to enforce federal work rules and determine eligibility?
You might ask, “what’s wrong with requiring an able-bodied adult to work in order to receive benefits?” Laura Harker, from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, explains that “the answer is that work requirements prevent people from accessing health care for reasons beyond their control.”
If you are working a minimum wage fast-food job, you are at the mercy of your employer who can reduce hours without notice: “Sorry, I don’t have a shift for you this week.” Family emergencies, inconsistent childcare, or sudden illnesses can also disrupt a person’s ability to work, and it is our lowest wage earners that are most susceptible to life’s unexpected twists and turns.
At the federal level, Medicaid recipients will now have to verify their eligibility under the work rules twice a year, creating the need for a monumental new bureaucracy just to verify eligibility of the recipients. The bottom line: Georgia showed us that if you want to keep low-income earners from accessing their health care benefits, impose work rules and create a complicated system for verifying eligibility and people will just give up.
This is why 8.6 million Americans will lose Medicaid coverage if the House version of the Big, Beautiful Bill is signed into law. What’s more, the bill also cuts $280 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which 42 million Americans use to purchase fresh produce and other groceries.
If the Big, Beautiful Bill passes, millions of Americans will lose their health insurance and millions will lose SNAP benefits to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest 1.8% of Americans. Those whose health insurance is at risk are among our most vulnerable: low-income earners, children, and seniors.
These devastating cuts clearly show the President’s priorities: It will be cuts in Medicaid and SNAP for the most vulnerable, and tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. President Trump was voted into office by hard working Americans, but his loyalists in the House, including southern California’s Ken Calvert, Young Kim, and Darrell Issa, have crafted a budget that leaves children, the poor, and seniors sick and hungry.
This bill is an abomination and does not represent the values of an America that has tried to extend a helping hand to neighbors in need. It should be stopped in its tracks.
The ball is in the Senate’s court now California’s Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff should do a full court press on persuadable Republicans and find enough votes to stop the poisonous Medicaid and SNAP cuts in the House version of the Big, Beautiful Bill from becoming law. The health and wellness of millions of Americans depends on it.
Flavia Mangan Colgan is a former political commentator and news correspondent who has appeared on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. She lives in La Jolla and works in the nonprofit sector.
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