Cuts to Medicaid Will Hurt Health Care

HR 1, formerly known as the “Big Beautiful Bill” is expected to have a massive impact on the long-term care and hospital sector. Some states, such as Idaho and North Carolina, have already made cuts to Medicaid in anticipation of HR 1.

North Carolina plans to cut nursing home funding by 10%, and the state Medicaid agency warns that there will then be a lack of sufficient funding to executive its necessary duties. Idaho also intends to cut Medicaid expenses by 4%, stating that the cuts are merely “consistent with what other states have already done and what more states will soon be doing.”

While Republicans claim that these cuts are not due to HR 1, the truth is that this act cuts Medicaid expansion. This reduction in the national expansion of Medicaid will force states to cover more of the costs. States rely on funds from these Medicaid provider taxes as a source of revenue to afford their state Medicaid-related expenses. For example, hospitals will be forced to provide free care to more individuals who are uninsured. So, while hospitals will experience higher expenses, Republicans can say that technically, hospital rates were not cut.

Then there’s nursing homes, which are expected to be affected even more than hospitals.

For example, when the state of Washington was forced to make cuts during the 2010 recession, a 2% cut was made to nursing homes. Soon after, an additional 2.7% cut was made. This reduced the amount of funds given per resident per day from $169.85 to $161.86—a difference that quickly adds up.

Worse, while the number of individuals able to use Medicaid in nursing homes has decreased by 1,964, the number of individuals using Medicaid-funded in-home or community services has increased by 22,329. Thus, the population in need of long-term care is only increasing while coverage is decreasing.

Long-term care expenses are expected to be the first cuts states make when Trump’s HR 1 goes into effect. Americans who tend not to notice politics or legislature are likely in for a rude awakening with the impacts of this deceptive act. Medicaid will become harder to receive and keep, and hard-working Americans will be turned away from the care they desperately need or be forced to receive a much lower quality of care. Friends and loved ones will find themselves desperate for any funds they can secure in order to afford basic post-surgery rehabilitation care; many of us may set up GoFundMe pages to finance our grandparents’ subpar care in a nursing home. Americans will become a much poorer and more hopeless society than the society that existed before HR 1 passed.