June 3, 2025

In today’s The News-Gazette, you can see the Guest Commentary that I wrote about the House Republican’s Budget bill and the cuts to Medicaid and other health and food programs.

You can read my commentary below, or you can find it on The News-Gazette’s website here.

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Here is the Guest Commentary:

Don’t believe political spin about not-so-beautiful bill

House Republicans narrowly passed their budget bill – the cartoonishly named “One Big Beautiful Bill” – that would slash funding for Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). These cuts would force around 15 million Americans off their health coverage, and raise healthcare costs for millions more, all in order to permanently fund tax breaks for billionaires and big corporations.

This budget bill was rushed through overnight, and while House Republicans admit this is one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in a generation, they voted for it without getting a full analysis of the proposal or holding a single hearing on the impacts of the biggest cut to Medicaid ever. Even without a full accounting yet, we know enough to know that the consequences will be devastating – from millions more uninsured, to increased premiums and co-pays, and more bureaucratic barriers to get and stay on coverage, to reduced benefits and scaled back services resulting from cuts to the hospitals, clinics and other providers on which we all rely.

The Senate has millions of reasons to reject this approach to a budget bill. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wrote in a New York Times op-ed that slashing health care for the working poor “is both morally wrong and politically suicidal.”  He stated “Republicans need to open their eyes: Our voters support social insurance programs,” Hawley wrote. “More than that, our voters depend on those programs.” 

No one campaigned on the biggest reduction of health coverage in history, nor on massive Medicaid cuts, nor on cuts to the ACA or Medicare, nor on higher health premiums and co-payments, nor on cuts to the SNAP food assistance program — but that’s what House Republicans voted for in this budget.

This isn’t a political game — this is literally life and death for low-income working families, people with disabilities, pregnant women and their babies, children, veterans, and people who rely on rural hospitals across the country — all of whom will pay the price of this disastrous bill for generations, while the billionaires reap the benefits.

Proponents of this budget bill use political spin and poll-tested talking points with coded words like “reform” and “waste, fraud, and abuse” to hide the reality of what their legislation will do. Don’t believe the political spin. The truth is that this would be the largest cut to Medicaid insurance in the history of the program.
 
Medicaid is widely popular and highly effective. More than 71 million people in this country, including nearly 40 million children, rely on it for health care coverage. In our state alone, more than 2,942,000 seniors, people with disabilities, pregnant mothers, and low-income families rely on Medicaid.
 
At the heart of these devastating cuts to Medicaid is a proposal they call “work requirements.” Those in favor of terminating health insurance try to frame work requirements as a common sense way to encourage work and eliminate waste and abuse in the system. But that could not be further from the truth.
 
The truth is that a majority of people with Medicaid who can work, already do. In our own community, that includes people who work in the low-wage jobs including in restaurants, gas stations, hair salons, child care, and so on.
 
And here is another truth that those seeking to gut Medicaid under the guise of “work requirements” don’t want you to know: these requirements create bureaucratic red tape at the state level that leads to people losing coverage while increasing administrative costs to states, and to you, the tax payer.
 
We have seen it happen before.
 
In Arkansas, the first state to implement Medicaid work requirements in 2018, over 18,000 people lost their coverage in just the first few months of implementing the requirement. Most were dropped not because they failed to meet the work threshold, but because the state’s reporting process didn’t work well.
 
Arkansas saw no measurable increase in employment – only an increase in the numbers of uninsured. And this policy cost taxpayers over $26 million in administrative costs to manage the work requirements system.
 
Yet this is the same plan that’s proposed in the House Republican budget bill.
 
Removing access to health care doesn’t make it easier to find a job. It makes it harder. Medicaid provides more than just health care; it offers a pathway to stability. And it benefits local economies, as does SNAP, which people use to buy food.
 
Taking away insurance and driving Illinois families into debt so corporations and billionaires can get even larger tax cuts is unconscionable and immoral. No amount of political spin can hide the ugly truth of this bill.

This fight for the future of our health care is not over. Call your Representatives and Senators and tell them not to sacrifice healthcare for millions of Americans just to benefit billionaires and corporations.

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Sincerely,
Claudia Lennhoff
Executive Director
Champaign County Health Care Consumers