States and local governments are beginning to experience the effects of cuts to Medicaid funding. Earlier this year, due to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, Medicaid funding will be cut by $911 billion over 10 years, resulting in an estimated 10 million people losing coverage. In response, various measures have been proposed on a state and local level in an attempt to reduce the deficits. For example, in Los Angeles County, voters recently approved a measure to raise the sales tax by a half-cent per dollar, to 10.25%, in an attempt to close the gap, raising roughly $20 billion over a five-year period. In the Bay Area, Contra Costa county had a measure on the ballot which would have added about six-tenths of a cent per dollar on certain purchases, but the measure was not approved by voters. Other states, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Connecticut, and others, have also had proposals in an attempt to address slashes to healthcare funding. However, the onus is often on individual counties to address the cuts and bridge their own funding gaps, often through putting more taxes on working people.
Experts are predicting a health care crisis for millions due to these cuts – a greater health crisis than the one the United States is currently experiencing. Low-income individuals who have challenges meeting work requirements, and immigrants covered under state-funded expansions, are the most at risk due to the lack of other coverage options under federally subsidized programs. In California specifically, the UC Berkeley Labor Center estimates that potentially 3 million people are at risk of losing their Medi-Cal coverage. This will be a trend seen across the rest of the nation. Those who lack coverage often will delay care until their health deteriorates, resulting in an increasing need to rely on our already-strained emergency departments and safety net options, such as public hospitals and community clinics.
The United States healthcare system is already in crisis, and we will see this issue become worse over the next few years. Healthcare should be a fundamental right, and the inability for people to access it is harmful not only to those individuals, but also to our communities and our society as a whole. The money and resources are instead being used to fund the military for more wars, police, and ICE agents to terrorize immigrants, and for tax breaks for the rich, at the expense of the poor. We can’t accept the impacts that this will have on our society – it’s up to us to organize against the system that puts their profits before our lives.
