On the Fourth of July, President Trump signed a budget bill that is likely to devastate health care in East Lewis County.
The budget bill — called the Big Beautiful Bill Act — is a 10-year plan that included huge cuts to Medicaid and to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). These cuts were meant to offset decreases in revenue to the government from the tax cut that will mostly benefit wealthy Americans.
Cassie Sauer, the president and CEO of the Washington State Hospital Association, said, “The One Big Beautiful Bill Act as passed by the Senate today is a disaster for Washington State’s hospitals and the patients we serve. There is no way we can absorb this level of cuts in the Medicaid program without massive impacts to all Washingtonians’ access to care.”
According to the non-partisan research group KFF, over the next 10 years, Washington could lose one-fifth of the federal dollars it receives to run Apple Health (Medicaid). Washington spends $21 billion a year on Medicaid with $13 billion coming from the federal government.
Harborview Medical Center CEO Sommer Kleweno Walley said, “Cuts to Medicaid will absolutely impact rural hospitals first and the quickest, because they live on such thin margins, and you change their reimbursement a little bit, and you are going to start to see those shutter.”
Gov. Bob Ferguson said, “Washington cannot backfill the loss of revenue.”
As a resident of East Lewis County, I am very concerned about how these cuts will affect the hospital in Morton with respect to the services it will be able to provide me and my neighbors. I am also concerned about how many East Lewis County residents will no longer have health care in a few years.
Medicaid funding changes are not scheduled to go into effect until 2028. Some of the work requirements are scheduled to begin no later than Dec. 1, 2026. Do you think the Republicans in Congress are afraid people might figure out what they have done to health care access before the elections?
Dan Meekhof
Packwood
