Health care advocates say House GOP's Medicaid cuts would harm children, people with disabilities
Sue Abderholden, executive director of NAMI Minnesota, talks about how proposed Medicaid cuts would impact people with mental illness. Photo by Michelle Griffith/Minnesota Reformer.
Health care advocates on Thursday raised an alarm over planned cuts to federal Medicaid spending, which currently helps provide care to 1.4 million low income and disabled Minnesotans.
House Republicans and President Donald Trump are considering a range of cuts to Medicaid — known here as Medical Assistance — including reducing what the federal government pays to states. Last week, the U.S. House Budget Committee voted to seek at least $880 billion in spending cuts in programs overseen by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which includes Medicaid.
Republicans want to cut Medicaid and other programs to pay for more border enforcement, defense spending and tax cuts that would give the most substantial benefits to the highest incomes.
In Minnesota, 650,000 children are enrolled in Medicaid, or nearly half of the total. Another 125,000 are people with disabilities.
'The size of the cuts being proposed in Congress make it impossible for people to not lose coverage and for covered services to not be eliminated,' said Tina Rucci, public policy director with The Arc Minnesota — an advocacy group for people with disabilities — during a Capitol press conference.
Cuts to Medicaid would impact Minnesotans across the state. Dr. Justin Schafer, a psychiatry resident with HCMC who's on rotation in Bemidji, said the majority of patients he sees are covered by Medicaid. In Bemidji, Schafer said he mostly works with patients with opioid use disorder, who wouldn't be able to access life-saving medication without Medical Assistance.
'I'm really nervous,' Schafer said Thursday.
U.S. House Republicans are also considering requiring enrollees to prove that they are working in order to access Medicaid, a move that critics say would add bureaucratic burdens to accessing care and have little impact because most enrollees already work.
If the federal government cuts Medicaid funding and Minnesota wants to maintain care in the face of rapidly rising health care costs, state government would have to fill the gap.
Minnesota is already facing a multi-billion dollar budget deficit, and additional state Medicaid spending would require tax increases or cuts to other priorities like public education, parks or transportation.
'We simply want to help people understand that Medicaid is something that makes our state stronger, safer and healthier,' Rucci said.
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