Editorial: Medicaid cuts rob from the poor

Published 7:26 am Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Republicans in the U.S. Senate and House are playing a game of one-upmanship to see which chamber can gut the most from Medicaid, the program that provides basic health insurance for tens of millions of lower-income Americans.
Much as President Trump and the congressional GOP try to hide the issue, independent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office shows 16 million fewer Americans will have health insurance by 2034 under the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
“The results of this cruel system are clear: Millions will lose coverage; health care costs will go up for all Americans, and tens of thousands will die,” Senate Finance Committee ranking member Ron Wyden and other key opposition leaders said earlier this month.
In the weeks since Wyden’s statement, the House drafted a proposal that was somewhat cautious, slightly repackaged at the behest of GOP members from districts where jerking health coverage from voters might swing the balance in next year’s midterm election. That legislation was sent to the Senate, which just upped the ante by cutting Medicaid “far more aggressively than would the House-passed bill,” national news media reported.
“In Oregon, 20% of people currently enrolled in Medicaid could lose their coverage,” Oregon Public Broadcasting reported, based on a Princeton University think tank’s state-by-state analysis. Oregon has worked hard for decades to improve public health by expanding its Medicaid program, known as the Oregon Health Plan.
Washington state is somewhat less exposed to big Medicaid cutbacks, at least in percentage terms. But many families will be impacted — as of October 2024 there were around 2.4 million total enrollees in the state, according to the state auditor, including about 850,000 children.
Sen. Patty Murray of Washington has been a vocal critic of GOP plans and this Tuesday spotlighted a previously little recognized aspect of the pending legislation — its impacts on reproductive health care, particularly on women who obtain care via Medicaid-funded Planned Parenthood.
The bill now making its way to being law, she says, seeks to make abortion care impossible to access everywhere by defunding Planned Parenthood — which would threaten the closure of 200 health centers across the country and rip away care from 1.1 million patients — and by banning government-funded health plans from covering abortion services.
“They snuck what essentially amounts to a backdoor abortion ban into the health provisions of this big, ugly, betrayal. That’s right, not only does this Republican monstrosity of a bill make health care more expensive, and harder to get — they are trying to stop health plans from covering abortion care altogether,” Murray said.
All the federal Medicaid cuts — which are being made to extend tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the richest people and corporations — will not only leave millions of Americans more vulnerable to illness, but also roll downhill to local hospitals and taxpayers. Hospitals will have to pick up more indigent care, passing bills on, in the form of higher costs for non-Medicaid patients and taxing districts.
The whole endeavor amounts to a shameful example of robbing from the poor to give to the rich.
Murray is correct in reframing this legislation as the “big, ugly, betrayal.”