By New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) on Sunday blasted Republican efforts to reduce Medicaid funding, saying potential cuts would “destroy health care as we know it.”
“This is very simply an effort to destroy health care as we know it, to rip it away from everyday Americans, make it more costly for everybody else,” Lujan Grisham said in an interview on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”
The Democratic governor warned that potential cuts would have far-reaching consequences across the country.
“It will close hospitals — think something like 432 hospitals across the country are on the edge right now. About a third of their funding … or more, comes from Medicaid. So you have less providers who have fewer access points.”
“No state, including this one — no state can take this kind of cost shifting. And you know, businesses then don’t have employees because they don’t have access to health care. It has a huge economic factor that they aren’t talking about, which is outrageous,” she said.
She also noted that “every state,” including her own, “is going to do everything they can to protect the people they are serving,” saying they’ve taken steps to prepare for reductions in federal support.
The interview comes amid significant uncertainty surrounding spending negotiations, in particular concerning Medicaid.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over Medicaid and is planning to formally consider and vote to advance its portion of the package on Tuesday, but the conference still remains at odds over potential changes to Medicaid. The budget resolution that served as a blueprint for the final bill instructed the panel to achieve at least $880 billion in spending cuts, which experts say is likely impossible without cuts to the safety net program.
Republicans are largely on board with imposing work requirements, six-month registration checks and barring those who entered the country without authorization from the social safety net program, a source told The Hill, and Johnson told reporters this week that a controversial proposal to directly reduce the enhanced federal match for states that expanded Medicaid, known as the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP), was off the table, a key red line for moderates.
However, the situation remains uncertain regarding whether the conference will place per capita caps on Medicaid expansion enrollees — another hard no among centrists.