Republican-Led Bill to Devastate Our Healthcare System

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said, “It was an honor to join Governor Kathy Hochul at Interfaith Medical Center in Central Brooklyn today, and I am thankful for her leadership, strength and presence on behalf of the people of New York. Across our great state, millions rely on Medicaid for life-saving and life-sustaining healthcare. Under Trump’s One Big Ugly Bill, 1.5 million New Yorkers would lose their insurance as part of a toxic scheme to enact massive tax cuts for billionaires like Elon Musk. Nursing homes will close, hospitals will shut down and Community Health Centers will lose funding. House Republicans from New York were nothing more than a rubber stamp for Trump’s reckless and extreme agenda, voting to strip healthcare from their constituents. We must keep the pressure on and continue to use every tool at our disposal to ensure that the One Big Ugly Bill is buried deep in the ground, never to rise again.”

New York State Health Commissioner Dr. James McDonald said, “Governor Hochul’s strong leadership and unwavering commitment to keeping New Yorkers safe and healthy is needed more than ever in the wake of these targeted attacks on public health and our health care system. These unnecessary and short-sighted cuts undermine the very health, safety and financial well-being of New Yorkers, especially those who rely on the health care safety net that’s being pulled away. This is not about Making America Healthy Again, it’s about Making America Hurt Again.”

The current provisions of the bill would decimate federal funding for Medicaid and the Essential Plan and cause almost 1.5 million New Yorkers to lose their health coverage and become uninsured.

As outlined in the House-passed bill, supported by all of New York's Republican Congressional delegation, over 50 percent of Essential Plan funding, amounting to more than $7.5 billion, would be eliminated, posing a threat to the program’s future.

Beyond causing substantial financial losses to the Essential Plan, the bill also targets Medicaid through a variety of measures such as requiring states to impose stricter work reporting requirements as well as onerous and duplicative verification processes. These measures will significantly increase the administrative burden of the program, both making coverage much more challenging to access and dramatically increasing administrative costs. The bill also eliminates crucial funding mechanisms and imposes new penalties that target states like New York that have invested in expanding access to healthcare. All told, the bill would cause an almost $6 billion impact on the State’s Medicaid program — including, amongst other impacts, approximately $2.5 billion in lost federal revenue and $500 million in new State administrative costs alone.

All of these provisions will have a dramatic impact on New York’s healthcare providers, placing immense strain on the healthcare system and triggering far-reaching impacts on local economies. The state anticipates a loss of over $3 billion for New York’s hospitals as a result of increases in uncompensated care and decreases in reimbursement.

Under the direction of Governor Hochul, the New York State Department of Health gathered data to create an analysis of these funding cuts passed by the House of Representatives in the Republican budget reconciliation bill. View the congressional district-by-district breakdown on anticipated funding losses alongside the previously shared detailed analysis.