Republicans in Congress plan to gut Medicaid, a program passed in 1965 that today provides health insurance for more than 70 million low income Americans.
The estimated $700 billion in Medicaid cuts is part of President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” will extend the tax breaks passed in his first term that went mostly to the already well-off and to large corporations. Despite taking Medicaid away from millions of low-income people, the Republican bill increases the deficit by over $5 trillion over the next 10 years.
The Republican majority in Congress also plans to sharply increase the ranks of the uninsured by eliminating subsidies that make Obamacare plans affordable for millions of low-wage Americans. These subsidies, passed during the Biden administration, are set to expire on October 1st.
The story the administration is pedaling to justify these cuts is that they are merely a requirement that able-bodied adults work at least 80 hours a month to qualify for Medicaid. Five cabinet secretaries wrote an op-ed in the New York Times this past week that branded Medicaid welfare. They claimed only 46% of able-bodied adults in the program worked at least half-time.
This is a much lower estimate than the one reported by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which uses the same data and found that just 8% of people on Medicaid failed to work either full or part-time.
So who's right? Who are the people on Medicaid? What does it pay for? And what will happen if Republicans succeed in sharply cutting back the program?
To talk about these issues, I interviewed one of the architects of the Biden era healthcare reforms, Dr. Benjamin Summers. Dr. Summers is a primary care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a health economist on the faculty of the Harvard School of Public Health. He also took time away from job to serve as President Biden's, deputy Assistant Secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services.
I hope you find our conversation enlightening, and emboldens you to join the many organizations and individuals fighting to prevent this egregious assault on the nation’s already tattered safety net.
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