Blue state lawmakers' response to Medicaid cuts: Keep calm and bash Republicans

Yahoo

05-07-2025

Most blue state governors and lawmakers are responding to hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicaid cuts in the GOP's megabill in one way: Do nothing for now — and blame Republicans.
Congress' Medicaid cuts came as dozens of state legislatures dried the ink on their own annual budgets and adjourned — some for the summer, many for the year. But in the face of a funding chasm no state can bridge, uncertainty over the effects of the cuts and the view that Republicans will take the lion's share of the blame, many blue states are opting to wait and see before trying to solve a problem they didn't create.
The megabill, which passed Thursday, cuts roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid. While a $50 billion fund for rural hospitals was added last minute to assuage Republicans representing some rural and purple districts, there are still strong concerns over how the cuts will affect the millions of Americans on Medicaid and the rural communities that overwhelmingly voted to send President Donald Trump back to the White House.
States that took advantage of the Medicaid expansion programs created by the Affordable Care Act stand to lose the most. Some GOP-led states, like Ohio, already have plans to roll back their own expansions in the wake of Congress' cuts. But few states have the budget capability to make up for the massive sums of federal dollars they could lose from cuts to Medicaid, food assistance and other benefit programs.
Rather than make eleventh hour budget changes or immediately summon special sessions, Democratic lawmakers launched last-ditch efforts to get Congress to reject the bill. While ultimately unsuccessful, the strategy is a sign of how Democrats may continue to message federal cuts headed into the 2026 midterms.
'You don't have to be a genius political consultant to conclude that it's a pretty devastating political message,' said veteran Democratic strategist Lis Smith. 'The only thing voters hate more than people who take away their benefits are people who lie and take away their benefits.'
Lawmakers and party officials quickly organized events across the country to pin the blame for the Medicaid cuts on the GOP. Alaska Democrats held an emergency town hall on Wednesday — attended by Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) — to criticize Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, and Rep. Nick Begich for voting in favor of the bill. Murkowski's support was key to its passage by a single vote.
In blue Colorado, Sen. John Hickenlooper and Gov. Jared Polis, along with Democratic House members and state lawmakers, held a virtual rally on the 'extreme' budget bill — which passed with only Republican support.
Democrats can, generally speaking, afford to wait. Many of the cuts won't hit until fall at the earliest, with the bulk going into effect next year. Most Democrats believe that Republicans will largely take any blame leveled.
Part of the problem for Democratic lawmakers is that no matter what they do, an insurmountable gulf remains between what their states can contribute versus what they will lose in federal dollars.
'We're going to do everything we can to preserve health care, but there's no way we can get … billions of dollars that they're taking away,' Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker told reporters Wednesday. The governors of Washington, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Arizona echoed Pritzker's sentiment in recent days.
In New York and California, leaders are already hedging their bets. Democratic Govs. Kathy Hochul of New York and Gavin Newsom of California could face pressure from supporters hoping they'll be compelled to make up at least some of the gap left by Congress and President Donald Trump. Hochul was already putting blame squarely on the state's Republican House members as the GOP megabill neared the finish line.
'They're in the majority, they have the power,' Hochul said of the delegation. 'You have the power, and if you don't use that power, then you are complicit in this attack on the American people.'
Some states — including New Mexico, Massachusetts and Oregon — have already made preparations for the anticipated cuts by preemptively increasing state health care program dollars or leaving an unallocated surplus in budgets passed this spring.
Oregon's recently-passed budget included $10 million for reproductive health in anticipation of cuts to federal funding for Planned Parenthood, for example. New Mexico — which has one of the nation's highest poverty rates and relies deeply on federal medicaid dollars and SNAP — will lose $2.8 billion in federal funding under the Big Beautiful Bill, according to numbers shared with POLITICO by the New Mexico Health Care Authority. The state's all-volunteer Legislature created a Federal Funding Stablization Committee specifically to address the cuts, and passed a bill in March that creates a trust fund to protect its Medicaid program. The first allocation into the trust fund was just $300 million, however, a far cry from the nearly $3 billion in cuts. But the fund is set to increase gradually until it reaches $2 billion.
In New Jersey, which finalized its budget late Monday with a $6.7 billion surplus, state Senate President Nick Scutari said even that large reserve won't make up for the federal cuts. Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy does not have immediate plans to call the legislature back into session
Most states, in fact, say they have the time to wait.
A spokesperson for Colorado's Polis said the governor 'is considering all options, including whether a special session would be needed.' California officials told POLITICO it's too soon to know how the cuts will affect Medi-Cal or the state budget, but policy experts said the state may have to open up the budget this year to begin creating the tech infrastructure needed to process the new work requirements included in the megabill. That could include sending money to counties to hire welfare eligibility workers.
As Democrats sort out their approach, they believe they have political winds at their backs.
'If your home burns down, you blame the arsonists. You don't blame the firefighters,' said Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson. 'The challenge for Democrats is keeping the focus on the arsonist who lit the match' between now and the 2026 midterms, he explained.
In red Ohio, the Legislature's Democratic minority already believes the cuts will help them scrape away at the state's Republican supermajority. The state legislature recently passed a budget with trigger language that would roll back state Medicaid coverage if federal contributions to the program are reduced by 10 percent or more. State Rep. Tristan Rader, a progressive Democrat, said the effects of the state cuts would be felt sooner than the federal cuts.
'Without Trump at the top of the ticket, we know that we can take back a few seats,' Rader told POLITICO. 'They're making incredibly unpopular decisions of giving away literally billions of dollars to billionaires while undercutting education and Medicaid — we know that's not popular.'
Shia Kapos, Ry Rivard, Rachel Bluth and Kelly Garrity contributed to this report