A Republican senator is already warning that Congress is going to face immense pressure to address the steep Medicaid cuts included in President Donald Trump’s massive “big, beautiful bill”. You know, the one that passed in July that the GOP was pushing, and then regretted the minute it passed.
Even though some Republicans supported the bill at the time, there’s already concern about what these deep cuts will mean for Americans who rely on Medicaid for their health care. It seems like the political reality of the situation is starting to sink in, and it’s not looking good for those who need the help the most. The thing is, the cuts aren’t set to go into effect immediately; they’re happening next year, and the senator is worried that a year is “not going to make any difference at all”.
The senator in question, Susan Collins of Maine, spoke at the Global Health Innovation Forum in Boston, and she didn’t mince words. She told the crowd that she backed other key parts of the bill, like extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and beefing up Medicaid’s work requirements. According to Fox News, she’s just really concerned about the nearly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid. Her main worry is that people who need care just “aren’t going to get it”.
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It sounds like a pretty straightforward and awful situation, and she’s not alone in her thinking. The fact that she voted against the bill should tell you a lot. She was one of only three Senate Republicans to do so, alongside Senators Rand Paul and Thom Tillis. She cited the Medicaid cuts as the main reason for her “no” vote, which shows you how serious she is about this.
To be fair, she’s not against trimming costs in Medicare and Medicaid in general. It’s a huge part of the national budget, and it’s something a lot of people are concerned about. But she argues that a nearly $1 trillion cut is just too much, too fast, and that the country just isn’t ready for it. She warned that once lawmakers “start seeing Americans getting sicker as a result of this, having delayed treatment because they no longer have the coverage,” the pressure will be on to change the law.
Maine, her home state, is a great example of the problem. About 31% of the population is on Medicaid, and Collins is worried that the cuts will be “devastating” for states like hers and for the people who rely on it. This will put more of the burden on rural hospitals, which are already struggling. In fact, she mentioned that one hospital in Maine has already closed and five others are “teetering on the brink of closure”.
She also made a point that many of the people who lose their Medicaid coverage will still end up in the emergency room. They just won’t have been getting the care they needed to prevent them from getting to that point in the first place. This means hospitals will have to deal with “uncompensated care” for these patients.
