2 days ago
Medicaid cut reversal bill submitted by Hawley, who voted for them just days ago
Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley from Missouri has submitted a bill that would reverse the Medicaid cuts made by President Donald Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill." Hawley submitted the bill just under two weeks after voting for the health care cuts.
Hawley's proposed "Protect Medicaid and Rural Hospitals Act" repeals the changes that Trump's bill, which was signed into law on July 4, made to both Medicaid state-directed payments and taxes states could impose on healthcare providers. It also doubles the federal Rural Health Transformation Program's funding to $10 billion starting in 2031.
"Now is the time to prevent any future cuts to Medicaid from going into effect,' Hawley said in a press release. 'We should also increase our support for rural hospitals around the country. Under the recent reconciliation bill, Missouri will see an extra $1 billion for hospitals over the next four years. I want to see Medicaid reductions stopped and rural hospitals fully funded permanently.'
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Hawley wrote up an opinion piece in the New York Times in May titled "Don't Cut Medicaid," in which he called cuts to the federal healthcare system "morally wrong." He then voted for the bill that made those cuts mandatory.
He recently defended his flip-flop on the issue of Medicaid cuts, saying he voted for the bill because the legislation made it so that Missouri's rural hospitals are going to get $1 billion in funding over the next four years.
But health policy expert Emily Gee, who used to work as an economist at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told KSDK, "That's plainly not true."
She said each state will actually have to apply and meet strict criteria to qualify for those competitive nationwide funds.
"There's no guarantee that that will be the slice of the pie that Missouri gets," Gee said.
View KSDK's full report here.
