Budget Cut, Medicare and Medicaid Dilemma

The Trump administration has just recently unveiled its third budget proposal on Monday. The 4,7 billion budget proposal has become a nationwide topic since he has proposed slashing $845 billion from medicare, which can leave millions of Americans uninsured.

How does this impact your health insurance 2020?

The administration proposed not only to cut medicare but also $1,5 billion in federal funding for Medicaid over ten years. This puts an end to the ACA Medicaid expansion, cutting and blocking granting the whole program and making work documentation requirements mandatory in all states.

The new proposal that Trump had was to cut programs like Medicaid and Medicare and increase the fund on defense and security spending.

The proposed budget is summarized underneath:

• $845 billion cuts to medicare over 10 years, about 10% cut to be achieved through targeting wasteful spending and provider payments and lowering prescription drugs costs.
• $1,5 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over 10 years, implementing work requirements as well as eliminating the Medicaid expansion under the affordable care act. However, the budget adds $1,2 trillion for marked based health care grant. This means that the states are given liberty in choosing which and how many people who are eligible for a healthcare grant.
• $25 billion in cuts to social security for over ten years. This includes cuts to disability insurance.
• $220 billion cuts to the supplemental nutrition assistance program, over ten years. The program currently serves around 45 million people.
• $21 billion cuts to the temporary assistance for needy families, which serves severely underfunded cash assistance program serving the nation’s poorest.

The budget proposed the failed graham Cassidy repel and replace bill which was defeated in Congress in 2017. The bill took both the affordable care act marketplace subsidies and the ACA Medicaid expansion and dumped them into a block grant for states that would later separate from a new set of the block grant for the rest of the Medicaid program.

The net effect of this cut is over ten years. The budget also proposed to repeal Medicaid expansion. The expansion has currently resulted in coverage for 17 million eligible adults. With this being done, it could eliminate Medicaid coverage for these consumers, putting their health and insurance coverage in jeopardy.

This also has a significant impact on children’s health. Medicaid has served as one of the insurance providers for more than 45 million children. They have helped children with special health care needs, many of whom receive specialized services.

Not to mention its impact on medicare. There would be a substantial and direct impact on the seniors’ finance. In this case, there would be many people who would rather change and convert to medicare advantage program which is administered by private insurers cooperation.

For people who have health conditions and are in the cusps of losing their insurance, they could be charged higher premiums by the company because of their health status. Not to mention that they will lose access to the wide network of hospitals once they are ruled out of Medicaid and medicare.