With former President Trump headed back to the White House, the U.S. Medicaid program, which covers medical care for people with low incomes, could face cuts.
But Medicaid’s transformation to a program mostly run by private insurers adds an influential industry to its list of guardians, alongside the rural hospitals that rely on the program to balance their budgets.
The threat to Medicaid emerges, in part, from simple math. Republicans are likely to go looking for some major places to cut spending to help fund a plan to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which expire after next year. When Republicans passed the tax cut legislation, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the tax cuts would add $1.8 trillion over a decade to the deficit.
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