Senate Finance Committee Republicans plan to amend the House-passed “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” to make even more draconian cuts to Medicaid—a move that would almost certainly cause millions more to lose their health insurance.
According to Politico’s report, the committee wants to lower the Medicaid provider tax—which states use to extract more federal funding to pay for Medicaid recipients’ care—from 6% to 3.5%. That would leave states having to either find millions of dollars to cover costs or make cuts to the program that provides life-saving insurance to more than 71 million Americans annually.
Already, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the House-passed bill would cause 16 million people to lose their health insurance within the next decade—both from Medicaid cuts and the GOP’s refusal to expand subsidies for people to purchase plans through the Affordable Care Act. The cuts could devastate rural hospitals, many of which are in red states, hurting President Donald Trump’s own supporters most.
And that’s just what would happen with the House-passed bill, which would block states from being able to raise the levy over the 6% mark. But the Senate bill would cut the Medicaid provider tax nearly in half.
In fact, a CBO report found that, had House Republicans included the same provision in their bill, it would have caused an additional 8.6 million people to lose their Medicaid coverage by 2034.
While making this cut would devastate low-income Americans who rely on Medicaid, it would provide Republicans with more money to offset the cost of their tax cuts for the rich. Cutting Medicaid even more would almost certainly be a political disaster for Republicans.
A Quinnipiac poll released last week found that 53% of Americans oppose the House-passed version of the bill, while just 27% support it. It also found that only 10% of Americans think that Medicaid funding should be decreased—which is exactly what the Senate proposal would do.
Other polling shows similar disapproval, with voters believing that this legislation would help rich people while hurting the poor.
And voters’ anger over the cuts is already bubbling to the surface, with voters showing up at Republican-led town halls to criticize their support for the bill.
Of course, in order to make this change, the Senate would have to pass the bill, and the House would have to take the bill back up again to approve the new cuts. And there are a number of GOP lawmakers on record claiming that they would not support more cuts to Medicaid, including Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and a group of House Republicans in competitive districts.
Though, given that Republicans always cave to Trump’s demands, there’s no doubt that they’d fold and accept newly proposed Medicaid cuts.
But no matter what happens, by even releasing this plan, it proves that Republicans have no qualms with harming hardworking Americans in order to give tax cuts to the rich.
To that, I say: good luck with that message in the 2026 midterms.