Medicaid cuts are hurting Wisconsin

When healthcare clinics close and people lose insurance, Milwaukee Dr. Chris Ford said, emergency rooms like the one he works in act as the safety net for a collapsing system. 

He’s already seeing warning signs of a strained healthcare system: longer wait times, patients delaying care until they’re critically ill, and more mental health crises. 

Medicaid cuts included in President Donald Trump’s budget law last summer are projected to cost the state $7 billion over 10 years. Cuts of that size, Ford said, mean hospitals will have to eliminate services, and the state could have to get by with fewer maternity wards, behavioral health resources, nursing home beds and rural hospitals. 

“Wisconsinites are going to pay for this cost with their lives. Period. Full stop,” Ford said at a recent press conference organized by the nonprofit Protect Our Care Wisconsin. “We are already seeing it. We’re seeing patients suffer.” 

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that Trump’s budget law would cut Medicaid spending by about $1 trillion over 10 years. 

A new report released by Protect Our Care shows how the Republican-backed budget law is affecting Medicaid in each state. KFF, a health policy nonprofit, projects Wisconsin will have 54,000 more uninsured people by 2034 due to the funding cuts. Across the country, KFF estimates that work requirements included in the budget law account for more than half of the projected increase in uninsured people.

“I want to be very clear: Medicaid that we’re talking about is not some abstract political talking point to those of us working in hospitals and emergency departments. It’s the difference between someone getting chemotherapy or delaying it. It’ll be the difference between a child receiving speech therapy or falling behind developmentally. It’s the difference between a senior … staying safely at home or being forced into a nursing facility, losing that autonomy, and it’s increasingly the difference between whether a hospital here in state of Wisconsin gets to stay open at all,” Ford said. 

Kiley McLean is a professor and researcher in social welfare at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an advocate for people with disabilities. During the press conference, she said Medicaid-funded waivers for home- and community-based care services are usually first on the chopping block when funding cuts happen. Losing access to those services could lead to unnecessary institutionalization for people with disabilities.

The system for providing support and care for people at their homes is already stretched thin, McLean said. Caregiver shortages and waitlists leave families to piece together care coverage. Without available at-home staff, parents sometimes must leave their jobs to care for their children with disabilities. 

“When community supports disappear, people do not suddenly stop needing care,” McLean said, adding that institutionalized care is more expensive than at-home care in the long-run. 

McLean criticized the work requirements for Medicaid included in the GOP budget law. Most people with disabilities who rely on Medicaid work, she said, but they have fluctuating needs and don’t always fit neatly into reporting systems. 

Medicaid work requirements in the budget law account for $326 billion in spending cuts over 10 years, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates analyzed by KFF. The work requirements are expected to lead to an estimated 5.3 million more uninsured people by 2034. 

“We have also consistently seen in our research and everybody’s research that work requirement policies often do not meaningfully increase employment, access to inclusive, competitive employment,” McLean said. “Instead, they create paperwork barriers that cause eligible people to lose coverage, not because they are ineligible, but because the system becomes too difficult for them to navigate.” 

Members of Congress weigh in

Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden recently responded to protesters against cuts to healthcare, WXOW in La Crosse reported. 

“American citizens have the right to peacefully protest. They get to make their voices heard,” Van Orden said on May 7. “I just wish they knew what they were talking about. There has been no cuts to Medicaid or Medicare. There’s not going to be cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. What’s going to end, though, is the rampant waste, fraud and abuse.” 

Hospitals in Van Orden’s congressional district were projected to lose more than $42 million in annual revenue under the budget law as of last summer, according to Third Way, a centrist think tank. 

During the recent Protect Our Care Wisconsin press conference, Democratic Rep. Gwen Moore said cuts to Medicaid will have cascading effects on health insurance that will lead to premiums for all policies becoming more expensive. 

“Americans are already telling us that costs are rising everywhere,” Moore said.