Health policy that is neither big nor beautiful

During my second and third years of residency (2002-2004), I periodically volunteered to see patients at a bare-bones clinic at a homeless shelter in Lancaster. We had limited amounts of donated supplies and medications and mostly treated acute problems. One evening, a patient with diabetes came in. He had been taking oral medications but could no longer afford them and was instead giving himself shots of insulin whenever he could afford a few vials. His hemoglobin A1c level was 15, meaning that he was walking around with an average blood sugar level of around 400 and was one mild illness away from a health catastrophe. I asked him to come see me in my faculty supervised clinic at the hospital and referred him to a social worker. Miraculously (in those pre-Affordable Care Act days, Medicaid eligibility was much less generous for single "able bodied" working adults without children), it turned out that he qualified for Medicaid. By the time I graduated, his diabetes, blood pressure, and cholesterol were well-controlled and he had saved enough money to move into his own apartment.

Like every major medical and hospital association in the United States, I lobbied against the budget reconciliation bill that squeaked through the House and Senate and that President Trump signed on July 4th. I send multiple e-mails to my representatives in Congress and encouraged others to do the same. The cuts to Medicaid and the USDA's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), totaling $1 trillion over the next several years, don't even come close to filling the $4.3 trillion budget hole created by extending tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Trump himself.

When some health policy researchers got wind of the options being considered to reduce federal Medicaid spending, they published a timely analysis in the Annals of Internal Medicine that projected the impacts of various cuts on Medicaid enrollment and the uninsured. The bill then being considered by the House was estimated to reduce the number of people with Medicaid by more than 10 million and increase the number of uninsured persons by nearly 8 million (because some people would be able to obtain another form of insurance due to increased income or becoming eligible for workplace coverage).

These estimates were horrifying enough, but the Senate version of the bill - the one that President Trump signed on America's 249th birthday - cut even deeper. 11.8 million people are expected to become uninsured, and (outside of the bill, due to Congressional inaction) an additional 5 million will lose private marketplace coverage due to no longer being able to afford to pay the premiums.

Medicaid is just the tip of the iceberg. As a fellow Pennsylvania physician observed, Medicaid cuts will hurt all American children - not just those publicly insured, since pediatric hospitals and health systems rely heavily on Medicaid rather than the relatively more generous Medicare payments that fund adult health care. States will either try to stretch reduced Medicaid funds to cover the same number of people, lower payments to doctors and hospitals, or both. Hospitals will be forced to close, leading to mass layoffs and more people with few insurance options other than Medicaid. Similarly, SNAP cuts will hurt American farmers and grocery stores in underserved areas where people will have less to spend on food. The Commonwealth Fund estimates that by 2029, the bill's impacts will include 1.2 million jobs lost nationally, depressing collective state gross domestic products by $154 billion and state and local tax revenue by $12.2 billion.

By then, a new administration will have been inaugurated that will need to clean up one big, ugly mess that the federal government created.