Thursday, February 27, 2025
As the United States House and Senate prepare to debate the 2025 budget bill recently passed by House Republicans, cuts to Medicaid spending could total hundreds of billions of dollars. Medicaid, the largest health insurance program in the US, covers more than 70 million people. Meg Comeau, senior project director at the Center for Innovation in Social Work and Health (CISWH) at BU School of Social Work (BUSSW) explained to MotherJones how Medicaid funding cuts will deepen health disparities, particularly for marginalized populations.
Excerpt from “Trump’s Medicaid Cuts Would Leave Millions of Americans Without Health Care” by Julia Métraux:
The truth of the matter is that most disabled people on Medicaid qualify due to income, which puts them at the highest risk for losing coverage if Republicans decide they’re not “poor enough” to cover. The approval process for [Supplemental Security Income (SSI)] can take years, with tens of thousands of applicants dying annually while on wait lists. That leaves many disabled people too sick to work before the government agrees they’re “disabled enough,” if they end up qualifying at all.
And while cuts to Medicaid will be devastating for tens of millions of Americans, said Meg Comeau of Boston University’s Center for Innovation in Social Work and Health, “We won’t be able to get a good handle for a while on how many people are in those optional categories whose coverage has been taken away.”