STAT+: Hospitals would be hit hardest by Medicaid cuts in GOP tax bill, report finds
To finance tax cuts, a GOP bill would reduce Medicaid payments to hospitals by $321 billion, hitting both blue and red states hard, a new report calculates.
WASHINGTON — Hospitals would bear the brunt of federal health care funding cuts in the Republicans’ tax bill, and they’d be hurt hard in states with both predominantly Democratic- and Republican-led governments, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Republicans are using federal Medicaid funding cuts to pay for part of the cost of cutting taxes in budget reconciliation, a process that avoids the need for Democratic support. It’s long been assumed that those Medicaid cuts would weigh especially heavy on hospitals’ finances because they reduce the number of people with insurance, and hospitals can’t turn people away.
Congress’ nonpartisan scorekeepers projected that the bill would reduce federal spending by $797 billion over a decade and lead to nearly 11 million people becoming uninsured. But they didn’t parse out the impact on industry sectors. The Urban Institute report takes that extra step.
