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Proposed Medicaid cuts included in Trump's "big beautiful bill" could lead to thousands of preventable deaths, according to a new study, per NBC News.
The sprawling domestic policy bill, passed in the House last month and making its way through the Senate, proposes at least $625 billion in cuts to federal Medicaid spending over 10 years.
Medicaid cuts could leave roughly 7.6 million Americans without health insurance, an analysis published by the Annals of Internal Medicine on Monday (June 16) shows. Nearly 2 million people could lose their primary doctor, 1.3 million would not be able to fill needed medications, and hundreds of thousands of women could be led to skip a mammogram.
16,600 people could die from losing access to care or foregoing it, researchers said.
“Patients who go without care because they cannot afford it often get sicker and sicker, until they end up with chronic illness,” lead study author Dr. Adam Gaffney said.
According to the analysis, the three changes to Medicaid that would have the largest impact on people losing health insurance include establishing work requirements, limiting states’ ability to collect taxes from Medicaid providers, and ending a Biden-era rule that streamlined Medicaid enrollment.
Other smaller cuts in the bill, including penalizing states that used Medicaid funds to cover undocumented immigrants, led researchers to determine that 7.6 million people would become uninsured.
“Parts of the bill that seem innocuous, that seem like they may be aimed at cutting fraud and abuse, will disenroll people who should be on Medicaid under the stated criteria,” Dr. Rachel Werner, executive director of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, said. “It’s not just about saving dollars and cents, it’s costing lives.”
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