Political battles are usually won based on appealing to emotion, not to facts, policy or logic.
However, you should still have those facts at your disposal for two reasons: First, they still help you craft appeals to emotion. Second, they also help you craft the actual policy. Besides, I'm a data guy; my primary job is to help put facts & policy into easily-understandable context.
There's two new stories out about where things stand with Congressional Republicans obsessive desire to gut Medicaid & kick millions of people off their healthcare coverage in order to give massive tax cuts to billionaires. The first, from Jessie Hellmann, Sandhya Raman and Olivia M. Bridges at Roll Call, has some pretty positive-sounding news:
...Johnson, R-La., said leadership had ruled out two Medicaid policies that could go a long way toward meeting the Energy and Commerce Committee’s $880 billion, 10-year savings target but faced strong pushback from blue-state GOP centrists.
First, Johnson said the emerging package wouldn’t touch the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage, or FMAP, rate — the portion of state Medicaid costs borne by the federal government — for the Medicaid expansion population, which is currently 90 percent.
Johnson also poured cold water over a provision that would implement per capita caps on Medicaid benefits for enrollees in expansion states, though he wasn’t quite as definitive on that front.
Gov. Whitmer Releases Top Lines of Alarming Report on Federal Medicaid Cuts, Finding Cuts Would Terminate Health Care for 700,000 Michiganders
MDHHS report also shows federal cuts to Medicaid will increase costs for hospitals and small businesses, and significantly strain state budget
LANSING, Mich. -- Today, Governor Gretchen Whitmer released toplines of an alarming report from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) on the impact of federal proposals to cut Medicaid. According to the new report, these proposed cuts would result in a loss of health care coverage for hundreds of thousands of Michiganders, reduce access to providers for all residents, increase financial burdens on hospitals and small businesses, and significantly strain the state’s budget.
In December 2024, 78.8 million individuals were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP.
71.5 million individuals were enrolled in Medicaid, and 7.3 million individuals were enrolled in CHIP.
41.4 million adults were enrolled in Medicaid, and there were 37.4 million Medicaid child and CHIP enrollees.
Medicaid and CHIP Applications Received
In December 2024, Medicaid, CHIP, Human Services agencies, and State-based Marketplaces received 3.0 million applications, or 11 percent more applications, as compared to November 2024.
The number of applications received has increased by 30 percent since December 2023 and increased by 84 percent since December 2022.
Total Medicaid/CHIP enrollment in December 2024 dropped slightly from November, by 171,000 people or 0.2%.
With all the understandable focus on Congressional Republicans efforts to effectively end Medicaid coverage for nearly 21 million Americans enrolled via ACA expansion, there's been much less attention paid to the other looming threat to healthcare coverage: The expiration of the upgraded financial subsidies for ~24 million ACA exchange enrollees, which are currently scheduled to end this New Year's Eve.
As I've explained numerous times before, the ACA's original premium subsidy formula was always far too stingy to make individual market policies affordable for many people...and worse yet, the subsidies cut off entirely for households making more than 4 times the Federal Poverty Level (FPL).
As you can imagine, this has been a monumental task; not only did I have to crunch a lot of data to break out the statewide numbers into House district-level estimates, I also had to convert that data into nearly 480 easy-to-read graphics...and then I doubled my workload by going one step further and adding high-res PDF versions for folks to print out in large format for town halls, rallies and #HandsOff protests nationally.
With the pending dire threat to several of these programs (primarily Medicaid & the ACA) from the House Republican Budget Proposal which recently passed, I'm going a step further and am generating pie charts which visualize just how much of every Congressional District's total population is at risk of losing healthcare coverage.
USE THE DROP-DOWN MENU ABOVE TO FIND YOUR STATE & DISTRICT.
With the pending dire threat to several of these programs (primarily Medicaid & the ACA) from the House Republican Budget Proposal which recently passed, I'm going a step further and am generating pie charts which visualize just how much of every Congressional District's total population is at risk of losing healthcare coverage.
USE THE DROP-DOWN MENU ABOVE TO FIND YOUR STATE & DISTRICT.
With the pending dire threat to several of these programs (primarily Medicaid & the ACA) from the House Republican Budget Proposal which recently passed, I'm going a step further and am generating pie charts which visualize just how much of every Congressional District's total population is at risk of losing healthcare coverage.
USE THE DROP-DOWN MENU ABOVE TO FIND YOUR STATE & DISTRICT.
