Medicaid cuts

Rep. Pete Stauber needs to stand up for the Eighth District. He can do so by telling his colleagues in Washington, D.C. that the cuts to the Medicaid program currently under consideration by Republican congressional leaders are unacceptable.
The Eighth District is a large, rural congressional district that serves a population that is disproportionately elderly and with a significant number of low-income households. Throughout the district, there are 19 federally funded community health center delivery sites that rely heavily on Medicaid funding to keep their doors open. Those include facilities in Cook, Tower, Eveleth, Bigfork, Northome, as well as Duluth, Grand Marais, Tofte, and Grand Portage.
These facilities operate at more-or-less break-even, which means there isn’t fat to trim. Cuts in funding will inevitably lead to cuts in the services provided to patients or the closing of facilities. The three community health care systems that operate in the district serve nearly 30,000 patients annually, and the vast majority of those patients live in the far northern part of the district. In our region, Scenic Rivers is a mainstay for patients, and its sliding fee scale makes it affordable for everyone. Without it, residents would need to drive further, in some cases much further, and would be largely reliant on expensive emergency rooms to address their needs.
And it’s not just community health centers at risk. As we’ve reported in recent years, rural nursing homes are facing unprecedented financial challenges. And nursing homes are even more dependent on the Medicaid program than community health centers, which can provide as much as 80 percent of their funding depending on the patient caseload in the facility. Cuts of any significance could force the closure of nursing homes in Ely and Cook and many other communities in the Eighth District. What options would seniors and their families have for handling elderly family members with significant care needs?
It isn’t just patients who would feel the effects of these kinds of cuts. In St. Louis County, a quarter of the workforce is employed in the health care and social service sector. Cuts of the magnitude being considered will cost plenty of jobs right in our communities.
Community health centers in the Eighth District leveraged $7.11 million in federal funding according to the National Association of Community Health Centers, and more than half of that comes from Medicaid. Add in the funding dedicated to nursing home care for the elderly and we’re talking about a real financial hit that will translate to jobs lost, local economies weakened, and patients going unserved. Approximately one-out-of-five residents in the country are on the Medicaid program, and that percentage is almost certainly higher in the Eighth District, so these cuts certainly matter.
While residents of the district voted to send Stauber to Washington and Donald Trump to the White House, most didn’t do so with the expectation that their local clinics and nursing homes would be on the chopping block as a result.
What’s worse, Medicaid is facing enormous cuts not because it’s unaffordable, but because the GOP-led Congress has a much higher priority. The cuts in Medicaid are being proposed to help pay, at least in part, for the cost of the renewal and expansion of the Trump tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefit corporations and the very wealthy. According to the Congressional Budget Office, that extension is expected to add $4.5 trillion to the nation’s debt over the next decade. Lawmakers are struggling to find offsetting spending cuts, but the magnitude of the Trump tax giveaway is making that very challenging.
Republicans are touting those tax cuts as a way to spur the economy, but economic growth actually slowed after the tax cuts were implemented during Trump’s first term. What’s more, if the tax cuts are paid for by a slash and burn approach to the federal workforce and funding for a wide range of community-based services, the economy will inevitably take a hit as tens of thousands of layoffs ripple through the workforce.
Stauber, who has issued press statements over the past two weeks attacking the Minneapolis mayor and Gov. Tim Walz over what are predominantly state matters, appears more interested in diverting attention from the major harm to his district currently being contemplated in Washington.
It’s time for Stauber to focus on his day job, serving the residents of the Eighth District. He can start by standing up for the clinics and nursing homes that serve a large portion of his district.