The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that more than eight million Americans would lose their Medicaid coverage if a Republican reconciliation bill is signed into law.
|
Listen To This Story
 |
Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which is slowly making its way through Congress, will not be so beautiful for the more than 8[] million Americans expected to lose their Medicaid coverage over the next decade so that more money is available for tax cuts for the rich.
That is the figure the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), on which both parties rely to calculate the impact of legislation, arrived at after analyzing the relevant language in the GOP’s reconciliation bill.
“In total, we estimate that the legislation would reduce the number of people with health insurance by at least 8.6 million in 2034,” CBO said in its analysis.
CBO’s findings contradict the statements of Republican lawmakers who said they were merely trying to make Medicaid more efficient.
The actual number of current recipients who would lose their Medicaid coverage is actually more than 13 million.
However, CBO had already assumed that about five million of them would lose their health insurance when an existing provision related to a premium tax credit is allowed to expire, and when a new regulation is put in place with which the Trump administration will make getting insurance through the federal government more difficult.
On the bright side, kicking all those Americans off Medicaid will save $715 billion, which can then be used to give tax breaks to those who need them the least. Of course, that might not be much of a consolation to working moms who can’t afford to take their kids to see a doctor.
On Sunday, Rep. Br.lett Guthrie (R-KY), who chairs the House committee that oversees Medicaid, predicted in a Wall Street Journal editorial that Democrats would use the opportunity of Republicans kicking billions of beneficiaries off the program “to engage in fear-mongering and misrepresent our bill as an attack on Medicaid.”
According to the Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, the legislation actually “preserves and strengthens Medicaid for children, mothers, people with disabilities and the elderly — for whom the program was designed.”
Republicans hope to achieve this by putting in place work requirements for beneficiaries. However, these would only result in a few hundred thousand Medicaid recipients losing their health insurance.
Guthrie was certainly right about the Democrats not taking this CBO prediction well.
“This bill confirms what we’ve been saying all along, Trump and Republicans have been lying when they claim they aren’t going to cut Medicaid and take away people’s health care,” said Rep. Frank Pallone (NJ), the leading Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee.
The lawmaker noted that the bill does not address eliminating waste, as Republicans had claimed.
“The overwhelming majority of the savings in this bill will come from taking health care away from millions of Americans,” Pallone said. “Nowhere in the bill are they cutting ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ — they’re cutting people’s health care and using that money to give tax breaks to billionaires.”
