Republicans’ proposed Medicaid cuts would strip healthcare from millions, including half of U.S. children, one in five Americans, and 40 percent of all pregnant women.
Are you a woman? Do you have a young child? Are you pregnant? Do you have a parent who is getting older? Maybe you’re a caretaker for someone who is disabled? Or maybe you’re a woman of reproductive age? Maybe you just live in a rural area? If any of these (or a dozen other categories) apply, then Medicaid likely impacts you. In fact, more than two-thirds of all adults in the United States have some connection to Medicaid.
Yet Republicans are trying to essentially cut the entire program, according to a budget that just passed out of the House of Representatives.
For the first time, we could see an entire foundation of healthcare that real people use every single day ripped away.
- Medicaid covers one in five of all Americans, including 18 million women.
- It insures half of all children in the United States.
- Medicaid covers 40 percent of every single baby born.
- It is the largest provider of pregnancy-related services for American families. To put that in real terms, that is almost 700,000 kids in Alabama. It’s 5 million children in California, it’s 3 million in Texas.
- It pays for kids’ check-ups, their annual shots, their medications, trips to the dentist and emergency room visits and care.
- Hands down, Medicaid is the largest provider of reproductive healthcare coverage in our country. For millions of women, Medicaid pays for their birth control and breast and cervical cancer screenings that can save their lives.
- Medicaid doesn’t just cover individuals—it keeps the lights on and doors open in hospitals across the country, particularly in rural areas. Millions of Americans, even if they have private insurance, count on Medicaid to make sure their community has a hospital.
Medicaid doesn’t impact all Americans equally.
- If you’re a woman of color, you are far more likely to rely on Medicaid coverage: 31 percent of Black women and nearly 27 percent of Latina women rely on the program.
- In rural America, over 60 million people count on this healthcare coverage. In fact, some of the largest beneficiaries of Medicaid benefits are Trump voters in deep red states like Mississippi, the Dakotas, Louisiana and Alabama.
With the number of families counting on Medicaid, you would think our representatives would be working to bolster and protect the program. Wrong. The House Republican budget proposes $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid—a number so large that if you spent one million dollars a day, it would take over 2,000 years to spend it all.
And another terrifying fact: $880 billion was the total cost of Medicaid in 2023—a number that no philanthropy can replace.
Some of the largest beneficiaries of Medicaid benefits are Trump voters in deep red states like Mississippi, the Dakotas, Louisiana and Alabama.
These cuts aren’t just about trimming things back. They could cut Medicaid completely. This would be devastating for communities, our healthcare system and the entire country.
To achieve the $880 billion in cuts, lawmakers have proposed things like work requirements. These kind of proposals may sound practical—lots of people get their insurance through their jobs—but it leaves out the fact that two-thirds of working-aged people who are covered by Medicaid are already employed, and many of the people who are not can’t work due to obligations like childcare, disabilities or other circumstances.
Medicaid is also enormously popular: Three-fourths of Americans have a positive view of the program, and this transcends party—and Republicans know it. Donald Trump himself even said in February he would “love and cherish” Medicaid and Medicare. But it hasn’t stopped him endorsing the bill, including these horrific cuts.
Medicaid isn’t perfect. There are gaps in what it covers—one of the biggest being abortion coverage. These gaps existed because of long-standing racist, antiabortion policies that have punished women who can’t afford to pay out of pocket for abortion care.
In fact, at my organization All* Above All, we’ve spent the last 10 years trying to get rid of the nearly 50-year-old Hyde Amendment. The law, which is added every year to the federal budget, restricts federal funds from going toward abortion services.
What does this really mean? That the millions of women who rely on Medicaid for their health insurance effectively can’t get an abortion unless they can afford it out of pocket—which in many cases is thousands of dollars. Not to mention that since Dobbs, for women in red states or places with abortion bans, even accessing abortion is harder than ever.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. When a woman is living paycheck to paycheck, denying coverage for an abortion can push her deeper into poverty. Indeed, studies show that a woman who seeks an abortion but is denied is more likely to fall into poverty than one who is able to get an abortion.
It doesn’t have to be this way—in fact, 18 states already cover abortion with their state-funded Medicaid programs and each year more states follow suit. But for too many women, this isn’t the reality—58 percent of women of reproductive age enrolled in Medicaid live in states that ban this kind of Medicaid coverage, and 51 percent of these enrollees are women of color.
With so much at stake for America’s women and families, representatives in Congress should be working to strengthen and expand Medicaid and the coverage it provides, rather than decimate a program that touches the lives of over two-thirds of this country. The fact that these cuts are even proposed, let alone have passed, is a sign that we are in an unprecedented moment of extremism.
There is a better way forward. If your life is touched by Medicaid, I ask you to stand with us in telling Congress to protect it, to work to improve Medicaid, and to make sure that every single person in America has healthcare coverage—no matter who they are, how much money they make or where they live.
Editor’s note: The organization Plan C has a comprehensive guide to finding abortion pills on their website at www.plancpills.org. Select “Find Abortion Pills” and then select the state where you are located from the drop-down menu. The website is continually updated and has all the latest information on where to find abortion pills from anywhere in the U.S. Abortion advocates have also created volunteer-run, donor-supported, community-based mutual aid groups around the country to provide free abortion pills to people living in states restricting abortion; information about many of these groups are listed on the website of Red State Access.
