Medicaid Cuts “Deeply Un-American,” Union Leader Says

President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, making it the largest tax cut in American history. This bill includes Medicaid legislation that is projected to reduce Medicaid spending by $1 trillion over the next ten years by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse,” in the system, according to an official White House brief.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that approximately 16 million people will lose their healthcare coverage as a result.

Approximately 310,000 of those people are Pennsylvanians, according to Matthew Yarnell, president of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Healthcare, Pennsylvania chapter, the state’s largest union of healthcare workers. Nationwide, SEIU represents more than 2 million registered nurses, hospital workers, nursing home workers and home care workers, including more than 45,000 in Pennsylvania.

In this interview, Yarnell explains why these cuts are un-American and shares how his organization plans to keep advocating for healthcare rights.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Matthew Yarnell

MHE: How will the recent Medicaid cuts affect your members and the communities that they serve?

Cutting nearly a trillion dollars from Medicaid is going to have lasting effects on our communities. In Pennsylvania alone, we believe it's going to impact about 310,000 Pennsylvanians.

There are a bunch of ways in which it's going to affect folks we're worried about, in particular, rural hospitals, which are already struggling. We've seen a number of hospital closures already, and we think that that's going to exacerbate that problem. We also are concerned about access to care for folks who need home care and skilled nursing care.

Many caregivers rely on Medicaid to fund their jobs in the care sector, and oftentimes these people are already living at or near the poverty level, such as nursing home workers and home care workers.

MHE: What concerns are union members expressing most frequently in response to these changes?

They are questioning the morality of a decision to fund tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires at the expense of the health of our communities. Why are we giving money to people who have more money than they know what to do with by cutting basic services for seniors, people with disabilities and veterans?

As a health care union, we've been advocating for better jobs, to increase wages and improve advocacy for safer staffing, and this flies directly in opposition to all of that.

The piece that's not getting talked about a lot is the silent attack on the Affordable Care Act. Many of our members that are nursing home workers or home care workers rely on Pennie, which is the Pennsylvania exchange.

With Congress leaving the subsidies to expire, people will see a significant hike this year, and we think there's going to be a significant exit from the exchange from people losing their benefits. These are people who work in service sector industries, who cannot afford or don't have access to insurance through their employers, who are going to have a huge increase to their premiums, and they will likely choose to not have coverage.

MHE: In your press release, you called the cuts “deeply un-American.” Can you elaborate on that?

It is un-American to imagine that we are throwing 14 to 16 million people off their health insurance in the richest country in the world.

There's so much waste in our healthcare system, and the priorities are so off that we ought to be able to cover every single person in this country. It should be a basic human right.

MHE: What message do you want to share with state and federal policymakers about health care workers on the front lines and the real consequences of the Medicaid cuts?

We're going to work hard to hold accountable the congress folks in Pennsylvania who voted to do this, and we're going to appreciate the lone Republican Congressman, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, who voted ‘no’ on this, unlike Rep. Rob Bresnahan Jr., who committed to not cutting Medicaid and then did it.

We're going to engage healthcare workers and other partners in those congressional districts to hold these congresspeople accountable for the actions they took.

At the state level, we’re going to continue to push for investment in Medicaid and investment on the front lines of healthcare.

We will continue to organize for improvements, even in a situation where we're going to have fewer resources to be able to do that.