Add topic to email alerts


Receive an email when new articles are posted on

Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on .

“
data-action=”subscribe”>
Subscribe

We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com.

Back to Healio

Key takeaways:

  • The legislation cuts Medicaid funding by $930 billion over 10 years and may lower ACA enrollment rates.
  • An expert broke down the bill’s “unethical” implications.

The House has passed the Trump administration’s sweeping domestic agenda bill, which experts said will have massive implications for health care in the United States.

The legislation, known as the “Big Beautiful Bill,” now goes to the president to be signed into law. Trump previously assigned an arbitrary deadline of July 4.









The US Capitol building


The House has passed the Trump administration’s sweeping domestic agenda bill with massive implications for health care in the United States. Image: Adobe Stock

The bill includes tax cuts and increased funding for defense, immigration enforcement and energy production. Leading up to the vote, House Speaker Mike Johnson said the bill will “make this country stronger, safer and more prosperous than ever before, and every American is going to benefit from that.”

Researchers warned against the detrimental impacts of an earlier version of the bill, which they said would lead to at least 16,000 annual preventable deaths and leave at least 7 million without insurance. But as the bill has passed through the Senate, and then the House again, changes have been made that would worsen these impacts.

For example, the Senate version of the bill adds roughly $1 trillion more to the deficit than the version the House passed back in May and leaves millions more Americans uninsured than that initial estimate.

These impacts remain in the version of the bill that passed on Thursday.

“This big, beautiful bill — in terms of its impact on health care, on how physicians and hospitals are going to navigate the next few years — I think is the biggest immoral piece of health care legislation I’ve ever seen,” Arthur L. Caplan, PhD, a professor and founding head of the division of medical ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told Healio. “Just unethical, indefensible and tragic.”

The details

Over the next decade, federal support for Medicaid will be cut by $930 billion.

Plus, for the first time in the program’s nearly 60-year history, certain able-bodied adults aged 19 years to 64 years will be required to work, participate in job training, volunteer or enroll in school at least 80 hours a month to maintain their Medicaid benefits. This will also be required for parents of children aged 14 years and older.

Medical organizations, including the AMA, ACP, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Emergency Nurses Association, condemned the Medicaid cuts. ACP President Jason M. Goldman, MD, MACP, said they “will have devastating consequences for the American health care system and the health of the American public.”

“Slashing Medicaid in the way that they propose, leading millions to go without insurance, and then adding on a work requirement in many states to stay on Medicaid is punishing our poorest, most vulnerable, disabled, mentally ill population,” Caplan said. “I can’t imagine any ethical system — secular or religious — that would say, ‘So if you want to reform the economy, one place to start is cut basic health care for your poorest people.’ And that is what’s going on here.”

There are also new changes to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which the Trump administration and its allies have long sought to dismantle, that are projected to reduce enrollment. Policyholders will no longer be able to automatically reenroll, but they must update their information annually. The window to do that has also been shortened — the open enrollment period will now end about a month earlier.

Additionally, anyone applying for ACA coverage outside of that period (because they changed jobs or need to add family members to their policy, for example) will need to wait for all of their documentation to be processed before they can receive government subsidies to help pay for their monthly premiums, according to NPR. But today, they can receive 90 days of help with their premiums while their applications are pending, as this process can take weeks. Proponents of the change have argued it is necessary to reduce fraudulent enrollments, NPR reported.

Between the projected cuts to Medicaid and changes to the ACA, the Senate version of the bill would leave approximately 11.8 million more uninsured in 2034, according to an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office released Sunday.

These patients who will no longer be able to access preventive services do not just disappear, Caplan stressed. They will end up in emergency rooms, further straining an already stressed system.

“One word of warning for doctors: be ready to institute much more aggressive triage if you’re working in an ER, because all of these people — the millions who are getting dropped, are the ones who can’t do copays, the ones who lose their ACA coverage — they don’t go nowhere. They go to the ER and they sit there with their headache, or kid with a cough, or chest pain and on and on,” Caplan said. “That means enormous strain on ERs, which were not meant to handle primary care, and it also means all of us face much longer waiting times, if that’s possible, in ERs. There’s going to be a lot more people there.”

“These cuts, they look like they’re just going to hurt very poor people, but they will hurt everybody,” he continued. “Hospitals will close, ERs will be jammed and services will get reduced.”

The bill will also impact the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the roughly 42 million Americans who use the assistance. The bill makes it more difficult to qualify for SNAP benefits as well as reduces the benefits for anyone who is eligible, according to The New York Times.

Currently, everyone except for parents with dependents must work until age 54 years to qualify, but the bill raises that age to 64 years for everyone except parents with children aged 7 years or younger. According to The New York Times, millions will now lose their benefits and many more will receive less than they do now ($292 for one person; $975 for a family of four).

Access to reproductive and sexual health has also been diminished. The bill included a provision to defund Planned Parenthood by making it ineligible to serve patients on Medicaid. This will be a major blow, according to the Contraceptive Access Initiative. In 2021, 10% of women on Medicaid who received family planning services did so at a Planned Parenthood location. (The recent South Carolina SCOTUS case paved the way for the provision.)

Caplan noted that the bill does nothing to address the key issue: why is health care in the U.S. so expensive?

“If you have the most expensive, inefficient health care system in the world — which we do — then you don’t do something about its cost and its prices, no wonder you’re cutting access through disqualifying people for Medicaid,” he said. “You must — and they didn’t — take on the attempts to get prices … under control.”

“They have failed completely to attack the core problem: … the cost of health care,” Caplan continued. “This big bill does nothing to address that. Zero.’”

Good news? Or just adding lifeboats to a sinking ship?

The bill also increases reimbursement rates for providers and lowers the cap on taxes that states levy on providers to help fund Medicaid.

However, this only applies to Washington DC and the 40 states that have already expanded Medicaid. And curtailing provider taxes — which almost every state has used for decades to increase Medicaid payments to nursing homes, hospitals and more, according to NPR — will lead to more strain on rural hospitals, which usually “operate on thin profit margins and rely on Medicaid tax payments to sustain them,” NPR said.

“The income that normally would be going to hospitals that have Medicaid patients is going to drop. That means, for sure, some rural hospitals are going to be in trouble right away because they’re merely scrimping by,” Caplan said. “They’re going to reduce their services for everybody, or just close.”

Caplan noted that the Senate added a $50 billion fund “to help cushion the blow of dropping Medicaid, but it doesn’t match what the income loss will be by throwing all these people off the government Medicaid program and the ACA coverage.”

It is also unclear if the increased reimbursement rates will make up for the lost payments physicians will face as their patients lose Medicaid coverage.

“That’s nibbling on the edge,” Caplan said. “That’s like saying, ‘Well, the ship is going to sink, but we did add two lifeboats for the 1,000 people that are on it.’”

Similarly, the bill includes a 1-year, 2.5% increase to the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule for 2026, which is meant to “account for ‘exceptional circumstances’ impacting physician practices,” according to the American Osteopathic Association (AOA). Although this will be helpful in the short-term, according to the AOA, “this increase is temporary and does not address the long-term instability of the Medicare payment system.”

Another potential positive is that the bill solidifies some telehealth flexibilities, according to the American Telemedicine Association. The legislation included “a key telehealth provision” that reinstates and makes permanent first-dollar coverage for High-Deductible Health Plan-Health Savings Accounts.

Still, AMA President Bobby Mukkamala, MD, said the bill ultimately “moves us in the wrong direction.”

“It will make it harder to access care and make patients sicker. It will make it more likely that acute, treatable illnesses will turn into life-threatening or costly chronic conditions. That is disappointing, maddening, and unacceptable,” he said in a statement.

For more information:

Arthur Caplan, PhD, can be reached at primarycare@healio.com.

References:



Perspective
Back to Top

Rita K. Kuwahara, MD, MIH

Today’s House passage of the Senate-passed 2025 reconciliation bill will have devastating impacts on the health of families across our nation. This bill, which will imminently be signed into law, threatens millions of families’ access to critical health services and nutrition.

The health provisions in this bill will cause over $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and ACA marketplace coverage and will cause substantial reductions in federal funding for SNAP. In addition, many categories of lawfully present immigrants, including refugees, asylees and survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking, will lose eligibility for Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, ACA coverage and SNAP.

Without access to basic health and nutrition services, our nation’s families and communities will experience worsening health outcomes and a rise in preventable deaths.

It is unacceptable to politicize access to health care, yet the Republican-majority U.S. Senate and House have passed a partisan bill that will cause an estimated 17 million people in our nation to lose health insurance coverage, including 1.1 million Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders. This bill will also destabilize our health care system and severely limit access to primary care.

Community health centers, which form the backbone of primary care in our nation and care for families living in rural and underserved communities, will be disproportionately affected by this bill, losing an estimated $7 billion in uncompensated care due to families’ anticipated loss of Medicaid and ACA health insurance coverage, which will threaten the financial viability and range of services offered by our nation’s community health centers and threaten access to essential primary care. Further, by jeopardizing families’ Medicaid and ACA coverage, rural hospitals, which are already under strain, will face increased risks of closure or will be forced to significantly reduce the critical and life-saving services they provide.

The harm that this bill will do to the health of our families and nation will last for decades. Access to health care and food is a basic human right and should be a nonpartisan issue. It is, therefore, extremely disappointing that this bill was allowed to pass both chambers of Congress and we must do everything in our power to counter the detrimental health effects of this bill.

Rita K. Kuwahara, MD, MIH, FACP

Primary Care Internal Medicine Physician

Association of Asian Pacific Community Health Organizations

Healio Primary Care Peer Perspective Board Member


Disclosures: Kuwahara reports no relevant financial disclosures.




Add topic to email alerts


Receive an email when new articles are posted on

Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on .

“
data-action=”subscribe”>
Subscribe

We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com.

Back to Healio