On July 3, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted 218 to 214 for final passage of Donald Trump’s federal budget bill, which extends enormous tax cuts disproportionately benefiting the wealthiest Americans by slashing social safety net programs for working families and the poor. In fact, the Trump-Republican budget constitutes the largest upward transfer of wealth in one piece of legislation in U.S. history, and increases the federal deficit by $3.4 trillion over the next decade.
This regressive budget cuts $1 trillion from Medicaid and Medicare, will take away millions of poor families’ access to food and nutrition programs and will close hundreds of rural community hospitals. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that these cuts will increase the number of Americans without health insurance by 17 million over the next 10 years. Public health researchers at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania warn that the new federal budget could lead to more than 51,000 preventable deaths annually.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Dr. Adam Gaffney, assistant professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Bruce Lesley, president of the group First Focus on Children. Here, they assess the expected disastrous healthcare impact for millions of Americans linked to the Trump-GOP federal budget bill.
DR. ADAM GAFFNEY: Look, we know that modern medical care saves lives. It can prevent disease. It can slow disease. It can control disease. It can save lives. When people don’t have access to care, when you take away coverage, when you take away services, what happens? It’s harmful to health and I’m an ICU physician. I see the consequences of patients not getting the care they need because they’re uninsured or they can’t afford it, and other reasons. They often develop life-threatening complications of otherwise treatable illnesses and wind up in the ICU.
So we’re going to see a whole lot more of this because this will be tantamount potentially to the largest loss of health coverage in American history. Just to cut to the chase, we did a study recently where we projected deaths and other forms of health harms from this legislation. And just based on the Medicaid cuts alone, we projected more than 16,500 deaths annually.
SCOTT HARRIS: That’s sobering. And there were some other estimates we’ll get to as to the possible mortality increase of people across the country. But I wanted to get to you, Bruce — again, Bruce Lesley, president of the group First Focus on Children. Tell us about the work your group does as well as your assessment about the healthcare and nutritional impact this just-passed Trump-GOP budget bill will have, especially on children that you focus on.
BRUCE LESLEY: The bill is devastating. I think in a lot of ways there’s 37 million children who are covered by either Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program. And there’s 15 million children who rely on SNAP or, people also know it as food stamps. And the bill provides over $1 trillion in healthcare cuts. Basically, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that 17 million people will lose their health insurance.
And then on top of that, there’s about close to $200 billion in food stamp cuts. That threatens the nutrition of millions of children across the country. And so the combination of those things, very often it’s to the same kids. And so, we are threatening both their health and their nutrition. And it’s astounding to me that what we’re doing is cutting the healthcare and nutrition of low-income children to give tax breaks to the wealthy in this country. That is the decision they made. And it is quite disturbing that in addition to this massive transfer from poor people to the wealthy, it’s also a huge transfer from young to old.
SCOTT HARRIS: Researchers at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania recently warned that provisions in the Trump-Republican federal budget could lead to more than 51,000 preventable deaths across the U.S. annually. And Dr. Gaffney, what’s your reaction to that figure? I know you mentioned another figure earlier about expected mortality as a result of these cuts. But generally, what’s your reaction to what I think everybody expect as more Americans will die as a result of this bill?
DR. ADAM GAFFNEY: Well, no doubt about it. It’s not controversial to say that modern medical care saves lives. It’s why people go to the doctor. It’s why we invest nearly a fifth of our economy into healthcare. It makes a difference.
The people who are doing all these cuts, they’re keeping their health insurance, right? They believe it matters. Yeah, of course, you can’t take away 17 million people’s health coverage and expect people’s health not to worsen and for there not to be some deaths. We had done a study where we looked at only the Medicaid cuts impact and we found about 16,000 deaths annually as a result.
The study you mentioned came up with a pretty ballpark similar figure for the Medicaid cuts, but they also looked at other provisions of the bill, like the impacts on elderly people’s medication affordability, as well as reduced staffing in nursing homes. So it looked at multiple provisions. In our study, for instance, we sort of projected health impacts and we found that these kinds of cuts would lead to nearly 2 million people losing their personal physician, 1.3 million going without needed medications. Nearly 380,000 women going without mammograms. And this is common sense, but it’s important to put numbers to it because behind each of those numbers is a person.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Dr. Adam Gaffney and Bruce Lesley (24:49) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. For periodic updates on the Trump authoritarian playbook, subscribe here to our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack newsletter to get updates to our “Hey AmeriKKKa, It’s Not Normal” compilation.
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