Millions of Americans Will Lose Health Care

The recent House reconciliation bill has proposed tremendous cuts to both Medicaid and Medicare, putting fiscally vulnerable seniors and people with disabilities at substantially greater risk. Such cuts would be the largest in Medicaid’s history and would reduce general access to nursing home care and community-based long-term services and support.

Currently, over seven million older adults and nearly five million people with serious disabilities depend on Medicare and Medicaid to receive health care coverage. Moreover, every 3 in 5 nursing home residents rely on funding from Medicaid and Medicare to afford the critical support services and care they need every day. This includes general expenses such as nursing home costs, as well as help paying premiums, deductibles, and for some Medicare recipients, cost sharing. Thus, implementation of these cuts in funding is sure to put millions of Americans at risk of losing heath care coverage and critical health services, which will further exacerbate the entire health system for all Americans.

This bill would work to reduce Medicaid access so that it becomes far less accessible for the American public by blocking Medicare programs that help people with limited income and savings afford Part B premiums (known as MSPs). In short, nearly 1.4 million people would lose access to a previously relied-upon program that may increase their out-of-pocket costs tremendously. For many, this will place necessary care simply out of reach.

In addition to general difficulty in Medicare/Medicaid access, the work requirements to be eligible to receive Medicaid would also become more intensely complicated for adults working or trying to work. More specifically, this bill would determine that 5.2 million adults would suddenly become ineligible for Medicaid, likely affecting seniors more than anyone.

Among other consequences of cutting Medicaid, numerous working and tax-paying individuals with lawful immigration status would lose coverage. While Medicare already prevents undocumented individuals from receiving such benefits, this inefficient attempt by the House to keep undocumented immigrants from benefitting from public care, will simply hurt more Americans.

Additionally, this reduction in funding will not maintain the premium tax credits that help over 22 million people—this would come despite the House’s numerous other tax breaks that it already approved. Without these credits that Americans have been relying on for years, nearly 5 million older adults may see higher premiums in the coming year. For those who simply cannot afford the extra costs, they may drop their coverage and go uninsured, leading to worsening
health conditions and even higher Medicare costs in the future.

Furthermore, these cuts would also place food assistance programs, such as SNAP, in peril. This House reconciliation bill would cut the SNAP program by about $300 billion, or 30% and thus cause millions of Americans, especially seniors, to search for other ways to avoid hunger and malnutrition. Unsurprisingly, this lack of nutritional support may also cause an increase in the number of older adults in poor health conditions that need living support. However, this bill’s collective decrease in support for Medicaid/Medicare and SNAP is likely to cause an infinite feedback loop; as more individuals stop using the costly care services they need, there will be more serious accidents, conditions will worsen, and there is expected to be an overall increase in deaths among millions of vulnerable Americans.

It is already well-known that most nursing homes provide inadequate and often extremely dangerous care to residents. This is attributed to drastic understaffing that forces all residents to receive insufficient and often blatantly harmful care, if any care at all. However, the House Republican reconciliation bill would also undercut a current rule that ensures a minimum number of staff to be present in nursing homes. Thus, while most homes are already dramatically and understaffed, this bill would allow them to be even further understaffed, directly endangering even more residents (regardless of their financial situation).

Ultimately, this House reconciliation bill would create a funding gap to be filled in by the states, who will push the cost to American seniors and citizens with disabilities. This will, in turn, cause health care services to be in higher demand, but less accessible to the public. Without federal funding, and with nursing home directors’ unwillingness to cut their millions of dollars in profit, states will quickly pass these high costs onto Americans, who will soon suffer from
their government’s clear attempt to reduce critical health care accessibility in the United States.