So, the Congressional Budget Office has published updated estimates of the budgetary impact of the House Republican budget plan (officially called the "One Big Beautiful BIll Act" (seriously); more appropriately called the #MedicaidMassacre bill by certain individuals (ahem) were to pass & be implemented.
In addition to all the dollar amounts tossed around, however, the spreadsheet also includes some important footnotes, including the following (h/t Larry Levitt of KFF for the heads up):
Under the Title IV - Energy & Commerce tab is this:
Last week I wrote about the latest state of play regarding House Republicans so-called "big beautiful bill" to gut Medicaid in order to give fat tax cuts to billionaires. Yesterday the first official version of the legislative text was released, and it's pretty much as ugly as you might expect.
...The plan caters more to the moderate wing of the Republican party by omitting two of the biggest and most politically controversial proposals discussed: a per-capita cap on people who get coverage from Medicaid expansion, and a direct lowering of the federal matching rate.
There's two new stories out about where things stand with Congressional Republicans obsessive desire to gut Medicaid & kick millions of people off their healthcare coverage in order to give massive tax cuts to billionaires. The first, from Jessie Hellmann, Sandhya Raman and Olivia M. Bridges at Roll Call, has some pretty positive-sounding news:
...Johnson, R-La., said leadership had ruled out two Medicaid policies that could go a long way toward meeting the Energy and Commerce Committee’s $880 billion, 10-year savings target but faced strong pushback from blue-state GOP centrists.
First, Johnson said the emerging package wouldn’t touch the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage, or FMAP, rate — the portion of state Medicaid costs borne by the federal government — for the Medicaid expansion population, which is currently 90 percent.
Johnson also poured cold water over a provision that would implement per capita caps on Medicaid benefits for enrollees in expansion states, though he wasn’t quite as definitive on that front.
I'm a couple of weeks behind on this (the full #AmRescuePlan, #HR1319, already passed the House late last Friday night), but Medicaid expansion is one of the core issues I cover here, so it didn't feel right not to give this a write-up.
Before the Affordable Care Act was passed, only certain populations were eligible for Medicaid. Low-income children, pregnant women, parents of minor children and those with certain disabilities and so forth were eligible up to a certain household income threshold ranging from as a ceiling of as little as 13% of the Federal Poverty Line (parents in Alabama) to as much as 375% FPL (pregnant women and newborn infants in, interestingly, Iowa).
