President Donald Trump’s signature law will simultaneously cause 10 million people to lose their healthcare while at the same time causing the nation’s deficit to skyrocket, due to the fact it also includes massive tax cuts for the wealthy, a new analysis has found.
The Congressional Budget Office released its official analysis this week, which showed that between 2025 and 2034, spending would be reduced by $1.1 trillion and cause the deficit to blow up by $3.4 trillion.
The legislation would cause 10 million people to lose their health insurance, though the review of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful” law did not differentiate between how many people would lose coverage because of cuts to Medicaid versus changes to the Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obama Care, the health care coverage-for-all law signed by President Barack Obama in 2010.
“It simultaneously hurts the poorest Americans while nonetheless increasing the deficit,” Bobby Kogan, the senior director for federal budget policy at the liberal Center for America Progress, told The Independent.
“It's actually almost unheard of to see something that cuts spending while doing tax cuts at the same time, right? Because you didn't have that juxtaposition of taking from the poor while giving to the rich.”
That number is slightly lower than the almost 11 million people who would have lost health insurance under the version the House of Representatives passed in May.
Senate Republicans ultimately needed to change parts of the legislation to comply with the rules of budget reconciliation, which allowed them to pass the bill with a simple majority as long as it related to federal spending.
Kogan, who previously worked in the Biden administration and for the Senate Budget Committee, said that the legislation has not only the biggest cuts to Medicaid in history, but also the biggest cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, in history.
At the same time, it also reduces federal revenue by $1.1 trillion by virtue of not only extending the 2017 tax cuts that Trump signed during his first term in the White House, but also includes additional tax breaks, including a temporary break for tips and overtime pay, as well as an additional $6,000 deduction for low-income seniors.
And that’s by design. In the earlier iterations of the House of Representatives’s budget resolution, Republicans needed to find steep spending cuts in order to extend the tax cuts.
The Senate passed the legislation with all but three Republican senators supporting it, but because of the strict rules of budget reconciliation, Republicans could not touch Social Security, and Trump had pledged not to touch Medicare, leaving Medicaid and SNAP as the biggest pots of money from which to slash.
The legislation mostly enacts health care changes through Medicaid, namely through requiring able-bodied adults without dependent children to work and by capping the level at which states tax health care providers like hospitals and nursing homes.
But the bill also makes slight changes to the Affordable Care Act. Specifically, Emma Wager, a senior policy analyst at the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, said that people with income below a certain level could previously enroll in the ACA’s insurance marketplace in a special enrollment period.
“You now cannot receive any premium subsidies if you enroll during a special enrollment period that's income-based,” she told The Independent.
“Which, if you have a low enough income to enroll in that income based special enrollment period, you absolutely will need subsidies to help you pay for Your coverage. So that is a virtual ending of the income based special enrollment periods.”
But the legislation also makes additional changes to SNAP. Specifically, it says that parents of dependent children have to work and lowers the age of dependent children from 18 to 14. In addition, it would require that states shoulder a larger share of the cost depending on the error rate for payments.
Altogether, the CBO found that in the course of the next decade, SNAP would see a $187 billion cut.
And there are signs that Americans are dissatisfied with the results of the legislation. A CBS News poll showed that 47 percent of those polled believe that the bill will hurt them or their family while 28 percent say it will have no effect. Only 25 percent of adults believe that it will benefit them.
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