Doctors, hospitals, and health insurers for weeks issued dire warnings to Republican lawmakers that millions of people would lose health coverage and hospitals would close if they cut Medicaid funding to help pay for President Donald Trump's big tax and spending bill.
But Republicans ignored those pleas, made even deeper cuts, and sent the legislation on July 3 to the White House, where Trump signed it the next day.
The law's passage marked a rare political loss for some of the health industry's biggest players. When unified, doctors, hospitals, and insurers have stood among the most powerful lobbying forces in Washington and have a long track record of blocking or forcing changes to legislation that could hurt them financially.
But health industry lobbyists are catching their breath and assessing the damage after Trump's massive bill raced through Congress in less than two months with only Republican votes.
Several lobbyists offered various reasons for being unable to stave off big cuts to Medicaid, a $900 billion state-federal health insurance program that covers an estimated 72 million low-income and disabled people nationally and accounts for 19% of all spending on hospital care, about $283 billion a year, according to the latest data. But nearly all agreed that GOP lawmakers were more worried about angering Trump than facing backlash from local hospitals and constituents back home.
"Members were more scared of Trump issuing a primary challenge than disappointing local voters who may find their hospital has to close or their insurance premium may go up," said Bob Kocher, a partner with venture capital firm Venrock who served in the Obama administration, referring to election primaries leading into the midterms.
Consider what happened to Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). After he took to the Senate floor to announce his opposition to the bill because of its cuts to Medicaid, Trump threatened to support a challenger to run against Tillis next year. Shortly thereafter, Tillis announced his retirement from politics.
But other factors were at work.
The health industry's warnings to lawmakers may have been dismissed because hospitals, health centers, and other health care provider groups are seen by Republicans as strong backers of the Affordable Care Act, the law known as Obamacare that's considered Democrats' biggest domestic achievement in decades.
The ACA expanded government health insurance coverage to millions of people previously not eligible. And no Republicans voted for it.
"Hospitals' support of the ACA has frustrated Republicans, and as a result there is less a reservoir of goodwill to hospitals than in the past," Kocher said.
Ceci Connolly, chief executive of the Alliance of Community Health Plans, said her lobbying team spent extra time on Capitol Hill with lawmakers and their staffers, raising concerns about how the legislation would imperil health care coverage.
"There was almost an overriding sense on the part of Republicans in Congress to deliver a major victory for President Trump," she said. Her group represents health plans that provide coverage in about 40 states. "That superseded some of their concerns, reluctance, and hesitation."
Connolly said she repeatedly heard from GOP lawmakers that the focus was on delivering on Trump's campaign promise to extend his 2017 tax cuts.
She said the concerns of some moderate members helped lead to one concession: a $50 billion fund to help rural hospitals and other health providers.
The money, she said, may have made it easier for some lawmakers to support a bill that, in total, cuts more than $1 trillion from Medicaid over a decade.
Another twist: Many new lawmakers were clearly still learning about Medicaid, she said.
Republicans also seemed eager to reduce the scope of Medicaid and Affordable Care Act marketplace coverage after enrollment in both programs soared to record levels during the pandemic and the Biden administration, she said. Trump's law requires states to verify eligibility for Medicaid at least every six months and ends auto-enrollment into marketplace plans — steps health policy experts says will reverse some of those gains.
Charles "Chip" Kahn, a longtime health lobbyist and CEO of the Federation of American Hospitals, which represents for-profit hospitals, said the industry's message was heard on Capitol Hill. But because the bill dealt with so many other issues, including tax cuts, border security, and energy, lawmakers had to decide whether potential health coverage losses were more important.
It was very different than in 2017, when Republicans tried to repeal Obamacare but failed. Trump's 2025 measure, Kahn said, isn't a health reform bill or a health bill.
It "left us with an outcome that was unfortunate."
There were some successes, however, Kahn said.
Industry lobbying did prevent the federal government from reducing its share of spending for states that expanded Medicaid under the ACA. Hospitals and other Medicaid advocates also persuaded Congress not to cap the program's open-ended federal funding to states. Both measures would have tallied billions more in additional Medicaid funding cuts.
The new law doesn't change eligibility rules for Medicaid or change its benefits. But it does stipulate that states require most Medicaid enrollees who gained coverage via the ACA's expansion to document that they work or volunteer 80 hours a month, a provision the Congressional Budget Office predicts will lead to about 5 million people losing coverage by 2034.
The law also limits states' use of a decades-old system of taxing health providers to leverage extra federal Medicaid funding. This was another loss for the hospital industry, which has supported the practice because it led to higher payments from Medicaid.
Medicaid generally pays lower fees for care than private insurance and Medicare, the program for people 65 and older as well as those with disabilities. But due to provider taxes, some hospitals are paid more under Medicaid than Medicare, according to the Commonwealth Fund, a health research nonprofit.
Kahn credits the Paragon Health Institute, a conservative think tank, and its CEO Brian Blase for pushing the argument that provider taxes amounted to legalized "money laundering." Blase advised Trump on health policy in his first term.
One hospital executive who asked for his name to be withheld to avoid professional retribution said the message — that some facilities had used this play to increase their profits — resonated with GOP lawmakers. "They thought some hospitals were doing fine financially and did not want to reward them," he said.
Still, Kahn, who is retiring at the end of the year, said he was pleased the Senate delayed implementation of the provider tax cuts until 2028. That will give the health industry a chance to revise the law, he speculated, possibly after the 2026 midterm election changes the balance of power in Congress.
In rural northeastern Louisiana, Todd Eppler, CEO of Desoto Regional Medical Center, had hoped Congress would pass the initial House version of the bill, which didn't include cuts to provider-tax funding. But he said any impact on his hospital in Mansfield, located in House Speaker Mike Johnson's district, will be offset by the $50 billion rural health fund.
"I am happy where we ended up," Eppler said. "I think they listened to rural hospitals."
Hospitals have argued for decades that any cuts in federal funding to Medicaid or Medicare would harm patients and lead to service reductions. Because hospitals are usually one of the largest employers in a congressional district, the industry often also warns of potential job losses. Such arguments typically give lawmakers pause.
But this time around, that message had little traction.
One health industry lobbyist, who asked not to be identified to speak candidly without risking professional repercussions, said there was a sense on Capitol Hill that hospitals could withstand the funding cuts.
But there's also a belief that trade groups including the American Hospital Association, the largest hospital industry lobbying organization, could have been more effective. "There is lot of concern that AHA statements were too soft, too little, and too late," he said.
AHA helped lead a coalition of hospital organizations that spent millions of dollars on television advertising against the GOP bill. Its president and CEO, Rick Pollack, said in a statement before the House voted on the legislation that the cuts to Medicaid would be a "devastating blow to the health and well-being of our nation's most vulnerable citizens and communities."
Pollack said in a statement to KFF Health News that the appeal of tax cuts drove Republican lawmakers to pass the law.
"Hospitals and health systems have tirelessly advocated to protect coverage and access for millions of people," he said. "We will continue to raise these critical issues to mitigate the effects of these proposals."
The nation's largest trade group for doctors, the American Medical Association, also opposed the funding cuts to Medicaid and other federal health programs. Its president, Bobby Mukkamala, said in a July 1 statement that the changes "will shift costs to the states and specifically to physicians and hospitals to provide uncompensated care at a time when rural hospitals and physician practices are struggling to keep their doors open."
But the AMA was also focused on securing higher Medicare fees for doctors. The law ultimately included a one-time 2.5% Medicare pay bump for doctors in 2026. This wasn't a victory because it left out the House version's permanent payment fix that would have tied doctor pay to the medical inflation rate. Mukkamala noted the temporary lift but described it as falling "far short of what is needed to preserve access to care for America's seniors."
Joe Dunn, chief policy officer at the National Association of Community Health Centers, said his organization worked relentlessly this year to prevent deeper Medicaid cuts that would financially hurt nonprofit clinics. Health center administrators visited Washington in February, made thousands of phone calls, and sent emails to members of Congress.
One payoff was that the health centers were exempted from the law's requirement that providers charge some Medicaid enrollees up to $35 copayments for services.
But at the end of the day, Dunn said, many GOP House and Senate members simply wanted to finish the bill. "They went in a direction that satisfied the president's timelines and goals," he said.
Chief Washington correspondent Julie Rovner contributed to this report.
As a postpartum doula, Dawn Oliver does her best work in the middle of the night.
During a typical shift, she shows up at her clients' home at 10 p.m. She answers questions they may have about basic infant care and keeps an eye out for signs of postpartum depression.
After bedtime, she may feed the baby a bottle or wake the mother to breastfeed. She soothes the infant back to sleep. Sometimes, she prepares meals for the family in a Crock-Pot or empties the dishwasher.
She leaves the following morning and returns, often nightly, for two or three weeks in a row.
"I'm certified to do all of it," said Oliver, of Hardeeville, South Carolina, who runs Compassionate Care Doula Services. It takes a village to raise a child, as the adage goes, but "the village is not what it used to be," Oliver said.
Doulas are trained to offer critical support for families — before delivery, during childbirth, and in those daunting early days when parents are desperate for sleep and infants still wake up around the clock. While doulas typically don't hold a medical or nursing degree, research shows they can improve health outcomes and reduce racial health disparities.
Yet their services remain out of reach for many families. Oliver charges $45 an hour overnight, and health insurance plans often don't cover her fees. That's partly why business "ebbs and flows," Oliver said. Sometimes, she's fully booked for months. Other times, she goes several weeks without a client.
That may soon change.
Two bipartisan bills, introduced in separate chambers of the South Carolina General Assembly, would require both Medicaid, which pays for more than half of all births in the state, and private insurers to cover the cost of doula services for patients who choose to use one.
South Carolina isn't an outlier. Even as states brace for significant reductions in federal Medicaid funding over the next decade, legislatures across the country continue to pass laws that grant doula access to Medicaid beneficiaries. Some state laws already require private health insurers to do the same. Since the start of 2025, Vermont lawmakers, alongside Republican-controlled legislatures in Arkansas, Utah, Louisiana, and Montana, have passed laws to facilitate Medicaid coverage of doula services.
All told, more than 30 states are reimbursing doulas through Medicaid or are implementing laws to do so.
Notably, these coverage requirements align with one of the goals of Project 2025, whose "Mandate for Leadership" report, published in 2023 by the conservative Heritage Foundation, offered a blueprint for President Donald Trump's second term. The document calls for increasing access to doulas "for all women whether they are giving birth in a traditional hospital, through midwifery, or at home," citing concerns about maternal mortality and postpartum depression, which may be "worsened by poor birth experiences." The report also recommends that federal money not be used to train doctors, nurses, or doulas to perform abortions.
The Heritage Foundation did not respond to an interview request.
Meanwhile, the idea that doulas can benefit babies, parents, and state Medicaid budgets by reducing costly cesarean sections and preterm birth complications is supported by a growing body of research and is gaining traction among conservatives.
A study published last year in the American Journal of Public Health found that women enrolled in Medicaid who used a doula faced a 47% lower risk of delivering by C-section and a 29% lower risk of preterm birth. They were also 46% more likely to attend a postpartum checkup.
"Why wouldn't you want somebody to avail themselves of that type of care?" said Republican state Rep. Tommy Pope, who co-sponsored the doula reimbursement bill in the South Carolina House of Representatives. "I don't see any reason we shouldn't be doing that."
Pope said his daughter-in-law gave birth with the assistance of a doula. "It opened my eyes to the positive aspects," he said.
Amy Chen, a senior attorney with the National Health Law Program, which tracks doula reimbursement legislation around the country as part of its Doula Medicaid Project, said lawmakers tend to support these efforts when they have a personal connection to the issue.
"It's something that a lot of people resonate with," Chen said, "even if they, themselves, have never been pregnant."
Conservative lawmakers who endorse state-level abortion bans, she said, often vote in favor of measures that support pregnancy, motherhood, and infant health, all of which these doula reimbursement bills are intended to do.
Some Republicans feel as if "they have to come out in favor of that," Chen said.
Health care research also suggests that Black patients, who suffer significantly higher maternal and infant mortality rates than white patients, may particularly benefit from doula care. In 2022, Black infants in South Carolina were more than twice as likely to die from all causes before their 1st birthday as white infants.
That holds true for women in rural parts of the country where labor and delivery services have either closed or never existed.
That's why Montana lawmakers passed a doula reimbursement bill this year — to narrow health care gaps for rural and Indigenous communities. To that end, in 2023, the state enacted a bill that requires Medicaid to reimburse midwives for home births.
Montana state Sen. Mike Yakawich, a Republican who backed the Democratic-sponsored doula reimbursement bill, said pregnant women should have someone to call outside of a hospital, where health care services can be costly and intimidating.
"What help can we provide for moms who are expecting? My feeling is, it's never enough," Yakawich said.
Britney WolfVoice lives on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana, about two hours from the closest birthing hospital. In early July, she was seven months pregnant with her fourth child, a son, and said she planned to have a doula by her side for the second time in the delivery room. During WolfVoice's previous pregnancy, an Indigenous doula named Misty Pipe brought cedar oil and spray into the delivery room, rubbed WolfVoice's back through contractions, and helped ensure WolfVoice's husband was the first person their daughter saw.
"Being in a hospital, I felt heard for the very first time," WolfVoice said. "I just can't explain it any better than I felt at home. She was my safe place."
Pipe said hospitals are still associated with the government forcibly removing children from Native American homes as a consequence of colonization. Her goal is to help give people a voice during their pregnancy and delivery.
Most of her clients can't afford to pay for doula services out-of-pocket, Pipe said, so she doesn't charge anything for her birth services, balancing her role as a doula with her day job at a post office.
"If a mom is vulnerable, she could miss a prenatal appointment or go alone, or I can take time off of work and take her myself," Pipe said. "No mom should have to birth in fear."
The new state law will allow her to get paid for her work as a doula for the first time.
In some states that have enacted such laws, initial participation by doulas was low because Medicaid reimbursement rates weren't high enough. Nationally, doula reimbursement rates are improving, Chen said.
For example, in Minnesota, where in 2013 lawmakers passed one of the first doula reimbursement bills, Medicaid initially paid only $411 per client for their services. Ten years later, the state had raised the reimbursement rate to a maximum of $3,200 a client.
But Chen said it is unclear how federal Medicaid cuts might affect the fate of these state laws.
Some states that haven't passed doula reimbursement bills, including South Carolina, might be hesitant to do so in this environment, she said. "It's just a really uncertain time."
The Trump administration's broadsides against scientific research have caused unprecedented upheaval at the National Cancer Institute, the storied federal government research hub that has spearheaded advances against the disease for decades.
NCI, which has long benefited from enthusiastic bipartisan support, now faces an exodus of clinicians, scientists, and other staffers — some fired, others leaving in exasperation.
After years of accelerating progress that has reduced cancer deaths by a third since the 1990s, the institute has terminated funds nationwide for research to fight the disease, expand care, and train new oncologists. "We use the word 'drone attack' now regularly," one worker said of grant terminations. "It just happens from above."
The assault could well result in a perceptible slowing of progress in the fight against cancer.
Nearly 2 million Americans are diagnosed with malignancies every year. In 2023, cancer killed more than 613,000 people, making it the second-leading cause of death after heart disease. But the cancer fight has also made enormous progress. Cancer mortality in the U.S. has fallen by 34% since 1991, according to the American Cancer Society. There are roughly 18 million cancer survivors in the country.
That trend "we can very, very closely tie to the enhanced investment in cancer science by the U.S. government," said Karen Knudsen, CEO of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and a globally recognized expert on prostate cancer.
"We're winning," Knudsen said. "Why we would let up, I really don't understand."
This article is based on interviews with nearly two dozen current and former NCI employees, academic researchers, scientists, and patients. KFF Health News agreed not to name some government workers because they are not authorized to speak to the news media and fear retaliation.
"It's horrible. It's a crap show. It really, really is," said an NCI laboratory chief who has worked at the institute for three decades. He's lost six of the 30 people in his lab this year: four scientists, a secretary, and an administrator.
"If we survive I will be somewhat surprised," he said.
After a mandate by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Government Efficiency to slash contract spending by more than a third, the cancer institute is cutting contracts to maintain precious biological specimens used in its research, according to three scientists. "The required contract cuts are going to be devastating," a senior scientist said.
On the NCI campus in Bethesda, Maryland, scientists describe delays in getting essential supplies — "literally anything that goes into a test tube or a petri dish," a recently departed clinician said — because of staffing cuts and constant changes in policies about what they can order.
Even the websites that publish new evidence on cancer treatment and diagnosis aren't being updated, because HHS fired workers who managed them. And when NCI scientists do communicate with outsiders, what they say has been severely restricted, according to documents viewed by KFF Health News. Forbidden topics include mass firings, President Donald Trump's executive orders, and "DEIA" – diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.
The turmoil at the National Institutes of Health's largest arm could haunt the country and the world for years to come.
"I really, really don't understand what they're trying to achieve," said Sarah Kobrin, chief of NCI's health systems and interventions research branch. "It just doesn't make sense."
"Efforts that are lifesaving now are being curtailed," one scientist said. "People will die."
Years of Bipartisan Support
Initially, some workers said, they thought the cancer institute might be spared. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called chronic disease — cancer is one — "an existential threat" to the country. Cancer research, with multiple NCI-funded breakthroughs in genetics and immunotherapy, has sidestepped the political minefields around other public health issues, like vaccination.
"People who care about cancer might be the biggest lobby in the country," said Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter, which has monitored oncology science and policy since 1973.
Count Mike Etchamendy, 69, of Big Bear Lake, California, as part of that lobby. Since 2013 he's flown to the East Coast scores of times to participate in five clinical trials at the cancer wing of NIH's Clinical Center.
"They call it the House of Hope," Etchamendy said. Between drugs, therapeutic vaccines, and expert treatment for his rare bone cancer, called chordoma, he said, he believes he's gained at least 10 years of life. He's proud to have served as a "lab rat for science" and worries about NCI's future.
"People come from all over the world to learn there," Etchamendy said. "You cut funding there, you're going to cut major research on cancer."
In response to a list of detailed questions from KFF Health News about the cuts and chaos at NCI, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said the reporting amounted to a "biased narrative" that "misrepresents a necessary transformation at the National Cancer Institute." Nixon declined to elaborate but said research into cancer and other health conditions continues to be a high priority "for both NIH and HHS."
"We are refocusing resources on high-impact, evidence-based research — free from ideological bias or institutional complacency. While change can be uncomfortable for those invested in the status quo, it is essential to ensure that NCI delivers on its core mission," he said.
Much of NCI's work is authorized by the National Cancer Act of 1971, which expanded its mandate as part of President Richard Nixon's "War on Cancer." Three of four of the cancer institute's research dollars go to outside scientists, with most of the remainder funding more than 300 scientists on campus.
And Congress was generous. Harold Varmus, one of more than 40 Nobel laureates whose work was funded by NCI, said budgets were usually handsome when he was NIH director from 1993 through 1999. President Bill Clinton "would say to me, 'I'd like to give you a bigger increase, Harold, but your friends in Congress will bring it up.' He'd offer me a 5% increase," Varmus recalled, but "I'd end up getting more like 10%" from Congress.
Congress appropriated $2 billion to NCI in fiscal 1993. By 2025, funding had risen to $7.22 billion.
Rat on Your Colleagues
During a May 19 town hall meeting with NIH staff members, Jay Bhattacharya, the institute's new director, equivocated when asked about funding cuts for research into improving the health of racial and ethnic minorities — cuts made under the guise of purging DEI from the government.
According to a recording of the meeting obtained by KFF Health News, Bhattacharya said the agency remained "absolutely committed to advancing the health and well-being of every population, including minority populations, LGBTQ populations, and every population."
Research addressing the health needs of women and minorities is "an absolute priority of mine," he said. "We're going to keep funding that." But a study considering whether "structural racism causes poor health in minority populations" is "not a scientific hypothesis."
"We need scientific ideas that are actionable, that improve the health and well-being of people, not ideological ideas that don't have any chance of improving the health and well-being of people," he said. That comment angered many staffers, several said in interviews. Many got up and walked out during the speech, while others, watching remotely, scoffed or jeered.
Several current and former NCI scientists questioned Bhattacharya's commitment to young scientists and minorities. Staffing cuts early in the year eliminated many recently hired NCI scientists. At least 172 National Cancer Institute grants, including for research aimed at minimizing health disparities among racial minorities or LGBTQ+ people, were terminated and hadn't been reinstated as of June 16, according to a KFF Health News analysis of HHS documents and a list of grant terminations by outside researchers.
Those populations have higher rates of certain cancer diagnoses and are more likely to receive diagnoses later than white or heterosexual people. Black people are also more likely to die of many cancer types than all other racial and ethnic groups.
Jennifer Guida, a researcher who focuses on accelerated aging in cancer survivors, said she recently left NCI after a decade in part because of the administration's DEI orders. According to several workers and internal emails viewed by KFF Health News, those included an HHS edict in January to report their colleagues who worked on such issues, and flagging grants that included DEI-related terms because they didn't align with Trump's priorities.
'I'm not going to put my name attached to that. I don't stand for that. It's not OK," said Guida, who added that it amounted to a "scrubbing of science."
Racial discrimination is one factor that contributes to accelerated aging. "There are a growing number of cancer survivors in the U.S.," Guida said, and "a significant number of those people who will become cancer survivors are racial and ethnic minorities."
"Those people deserve to be studied," she said. "How can you help those people if you're not even studying them?"
In May, NCI informed leaders of the Comprehensive Partnerships to Advance Cancer Health Equity, a program that links 14 large U.S. cancer centers with minority-serving colleges and universities, that their funding would be cut. The project's Notice of Funding Opportunity — the mechanism the government uses to award grants — had been suddenly taken offline, meaning NCI staffers couldn't award future funding, according to three sources and internal communications viewed by KFF Health News. These "unpublishings" have often occurred without warning, explanation, or even notification of the grantee that no more money would be coming.
The cancer partnerships have trained more than 8,500 scientists. They're designed to address widely documented disparities in cancer care by having top medical schools place students from rural, poor, and minority-serving schools and community clinics in research, training, and outreach.
Research shows that patients from racial and ethnic minorities receive better medical care and have improved outcomes when their clinicians share their background.
"I'm from an immigrant family, the first to graduate in my family," said Elena Martinez, a professor of family medicine and public health at the University of California-San Diego, who leads one of the partnerships with colleagues at largely Hispanic Cal State-San Diego. "I wouldn't be here without this kind of program, and there won't be people like me here in the future if we cut these programs."
Silencing the Science Communicators
In early April, when the dust settled after mass firings across HHS, workers in NCI's communications office were relieved they still had their jobs.
It didn't last. A month later, HHS fired nearly all of them, three former workers said. Combined with retirements and other departures, a skeleton crew of six or seven remain of about 75 people. "We were all completely blindsided," a fired worker said. NCI leadership "had no idea that this was happening."
As a result, websites, newsletters, and other resources for patients and doctors about the latest evidence in cancer treatment aren't being updated. They include Cancer.gov and NCI's widely used Physician Data Query, which compile research findings that doctors turn to when caring for cancer patients.
Gary Kreps, founding director of the Center for Health and Risk Communication at George Mason University, said he relied on Physician Data Query when his father was diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer, taking PDQ printouts when he met with his dad's doctors. "It made a huge difference," Kreps said. "He ended up living, like, another three years" — longer than expected — "and enjoyed the rest of his life."
As of May 30, banners at the top of the Cancer.gov and PDQ websites said, "Due to HHS restructuring and reduction in workforce efforts, the information on this website may not be up to date and pages will indicate as such." The banners are gone, but neither website was being updated, according to a fired worker with knowledge of the situation.
Outdated PDQ information is "really very dangerous," Kreps said.
Wiping out NCI's communications staff makes it harder to share complex and ever-changing information that doctors and patients need, said Peter Garrett, who headed NCI's communications before retiring in May. Garrett said he left because of concerns about political interference.
"The science isn't finished until it's communicated," he said. "Without the government playing that role, who's going to step in?"
A Budget To 'Destroy Clinical Research'
Following court decisions that blocked some NIH grant cancellations or rendered them "void" and "illegal," NIH official Michelle Bulls in late June told staffers to stop terminating grants. However, NCI workers told KFF Health News they continue to review grants flagged by NIH to assess whether they align with Trump administration priorities. Courts have ordered NIH to reinstate some terminated grants, but not all of them.
At NCI and across NIH, staffers remain anxious.
The White House wants Congress to slash the cancer institute's budget by nearly 40%, to $4.53 billion, as part of a larger proposal to sharply reduce NIH's fiscal 2026 coffers.
Bhattacharya has said he wants NIH to fund more big, breakthrough research. Major cuts could have the opposite effect, Knudsen said. When NCI funding shrinks, "it's the safe science that tends to get funded, not the science that is game changing and has the potential to be transformative for cures."
Usually the president's budget is dead on arrival in Congress, and members of both parties have expressed doubt about Trump's 2026 proposal. But agency workers, outside scientists, and patients fear this one may stick, with devastating impact.
It would force NCI to suspend all new grants or cut existing grants so severely that the gaps will close many labs, said Varmus, who ran NCI from 2010 to 2015. Add that to the impact on NCI's contracts, clinical trials, internal research, and salaries, he said, and "you can reliably say that NCI will be unable to keep up in any way with the promise of science that's currently underway."
The NCI laboratory chief, who has worked at the institute for decades, put it this way: "If the 40% budget cut passes in Congress, it will destroy clinical research at NCI."
KFF Health News correspondent Rae Ellen Bichell contributed to this report.
Nicole Silva's 4-year-old daughter was headed to a relative's house near the southern Colorado town of La Jara when a vehicle T-boned the car she was riding in. A cascade of ambulance rides ensued — a ground ambulance to a local hospital, an air ambulance to Denver, and another ground ambulance to Children's Hospital Colorado.
Silva's daughter was on Medicaid, which was supposed to cover the cost of the ambulances. But one of the three ambulance companies, Northglenn Ambulance, a public company since acquired by a private one, sent Silva's bill to a debt collector. It was for $2,181.60, which grew to more than $3,000 with court fees and interest, court records show. The preschool teacher couldn't pay, and the collector garnished Silva's wages.
"It put us so behind on bills — our house payment, electric, phone bills, food for the kids," said Silva, whose daughter recovered fully from the 2015 crash. "It took away from everything."
Some state legislators are looking to curb bills like the one she received — surprise bills for ground ambulance rides.
When an ambulance company charges more than an insurer is willing to pay, patients can be left with a big bill they probably had no choice in.
States are trying to fill a gap left by the federal No Surprises Act, which covers air ambulances but not ground services, including ambulances that travel by road and water. This year, Utah and North Dakota joined 18 other states that have passed protections against surprise billing for such rides.
Those protections often include setting a minimum for insurers to pay out if someone they cover needs a ride. But the sticking point is where to set that bar. Legislation in Colorado and Montana stalled this year because policymakers worried that forcing insurers to pay more would lead to higher health coverage costs for everyone.
Surprise ambulance bills are one piece of a health care system that systematically saddles Americans with medical debt, straining their finances, preventing them from accessing care, and increasing racial disparities, as KFF Health News has reported.
"If people are hesitating to call the ambulance because they're worried about putting a huge financial burden on their family, it means we're going to get stroke victims who don't get to the hospital on time," said Patricia Kelmar, who directs health care campaigns at PIRG, a national consumer advocacy group. "It means that person who's worried it might be a heart attack won't call."
The No Surprises Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2020, says that for most emergency services, patients can be billed for out-of-network care only for the same amount they would have been billed if it were in-network. Like doctors or hospitals, ambulance companies can contract with insurers, making them in-network. Those that don't remain out-of-network.
But unlike when making an appointment with a doctor or planning a surgery, a patient generally can't choose the ambulance company that will respond to their 911 call. This means they can get hit with large out-of-network bills.
Federal lawmakers punted on including ground ambulances, in part because of the variety of business models — from private companies to volunteer fire departments — and a lack of data on how much rides cost.
Instead, Congress created an advisory committee that issued recommendations last year. Its overarching conclusion — that patients shouldn't be stuck in the crossfire between providers and payers — was not controversial or partisan. In Colorado, a measure aimed at expanding protections from surprise ambulance bills got a unanimous thumbs-up in both legislative chambers.
Colorado had previously passed a law protecting people from surprise bills from private ambulance companies. This new measure was aimed at providing similar protections against bills from public ambulance services and for transfers between hospitals.
"We knew it had bipartisan support, but there are some people that vote no on everything," said a pleasantly surprised Karen McCormick, a Democratic state representative.
A less pleasant surprise came later, when Gov. Jared Polis, who is also a Democrat, vetoed it, citing the fear of rising premiums.
States can do only so much on this issue, because state laws apply only to state-regulated health plans. That leaves out a lot of workers. According to a 2024 national survey by KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News, 63% of people who work for private employers and get health insurance through their jobs have self-funded plans, which aren't state-regulated.
"It's why we need a federal ambulance protection law, even if we passed 50 state laws," Kelmar said.
According to data from the Colorado secretary of state's office, the only lobbying groups registered as "opposing" the bill were Anthem and UnitedHealth Group, plus UnitedHealth subsidiaries Optum and UnitedHealthcare.
As soon as the legislative session ended in May, Kevin McFatridge, executive director of the Colorado Association of Health Plans, a trade group representing health insurance companies in the state, sent a letter to the governor requesting a veto, with an estimate that the legislation would result in premiums rising 0.4%.
The Colorado bill said local governments — such as cities, counties, or special districts — would set rates.
"We are in a much better place by not having local entities set their own rates," McFatridge told KFF Health News. "That's almost like the fox managing the henhouse."
Jack Hoadley, an emeritus research professor with Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy, said it isn't clear whether state laws approved elsewhere are raising premiums, or if so by how much. Hoadley said Washington state is expected to come out with an impact analysis of its law in a couple of years.
The national trade association for insurance companies declined to provide a comment for this article. Instead, AHIP forwarded letters that its leaders submitted to lawmakers in Ohio, West Virginia, and North Dakota this year opposing measures in each state to set base ambulance rates. AHIP leadership described the proposals as inflated, government-mandated pricing that would reduce insurers' chance to negotiate fair prices. Ultimately, the association warned, the proposed minimums would increase health care costs.
In Montana, legislators were considering a minimum reimbursement for ground ambulances of 400% of what Medicare pays, or at a set local rate if one exists. The proposal was sponsored by two Republicans and backed by ambulance companies. Health insurers successfully lobbied against it, arguing that the price was too steep.
Sarah Clerget, a lobbyist representing AHIP, told Montana lawmakers in a legislative hearing that it's already hard to get ambulance companies to go in-network with insurers, "because folks are going to need ambulance care regardless of whether their insurance company will cover it." She said the state's proposal would leave those paying for health coverage with the burden of the new price.
"None of us like our insurance rates to move," Republican state Sen. Mark Noland said during a legislative meeting as a committee tabled the bill. He equated the proposed minimum to a mandate that could lead to people having to pay more for health coverage for an important but nonetheless niche service.
Colorado's governor was similarly focused on premiums. Polis said in his veto letter that the legislation would have raised premiums between 73 cents and $2.15 per member per month.
"I agree that filling this gap in enforcement is crucial to saving people money on health care," he wrote. "However, those cost savings are outweighed in my view by the premium increases."
Isabel Cruz, policy director at the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, which supported the bill, said that even if premiums did rise, Coloradans might be OK with the change. After all, she said, they'd be trading the threat of a big ambulance bill for the price of half a cup of coffee per month.
Signed into law, the bill will reverse many of the health coverage gains of the Biden and Obama administrations, whose policies made it easier for millions of people to access healthcare.
This article was published on Wednesday, July 2, 2025 in KFF Health News.
President Donald Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" cuts federal spending on Medicaid and Affordable Care Act marketplaces by about $1 trillion over a decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, threatening the physical and financial health of tens of millions of Americans.
The bill, which has been signed into law, will reverse many of the health coverage gains of the Biden and Obama administrations, whose policies made it easier for millions of people to access health care and reduced the U.S. uninsured rate to record lows.
The Senate plan to slash Medicaid and ACA marketplace funding could lead to nearly 12 million more people without insurance by 2034, the CBO estimates. That in turn would harm the finances of hospitals, nursing homes, and community health centers — which would have to absorb more of the cost of treating uninsured people — and may force them to reduce services and employees, as well as close facilities.
The legislation is nearing Trump's desk, though first the Senate and House must approve the same version. The House passed its own version in May and is expected to consider the Senate's version today, according to House Majority Whip Tom Emmer.
Here are five ways the GOP's plans may affect health care access.
Need Medicaid? Then Get a Job
The deepest cuts to health care spending come from a proposed Medicaid work requirement, which would cut off coverage for millions of enrollees who do not meet new employment or reporting standards.
In 40 states and Washington, D.C., all of which have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, some Medicaid enrollees would have to regularly file paperwork proving that they are working, volunteering, or attending school at least 80 hours a month, or that they qualify for an exemption, such as caring for a young child.
The bill's requirement would not apply to people in the 10 largely GOP-led states that have not expanded Medicaid.
Health researchers say the policy would have little impact on employment. Most working-age Medicaid enrollees who don't receive disability benefits already work or are looking for work, or are unable to do so because they have a disability, attend school, or care for a family member, according to KFF.
State experiments with work requirements have been plagued with administrative issues, such as eligible enrollees' losing coverage over paperwork problems, and budget overruns. Georgia's work requirement, which officially launched in July 2023, has cost more than $90 million, with only $26 million of that spent on health benefits, according to the Georgia Budget & Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization.
"The hidden costs are astronomical," said Chima Ndumele, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health.
Less Cash Means Less Care in Rural Communities
Belt-tightening that would target states could translate into fewer health services, medical professionals, and even hospitals, especially in rural communities.
The GOP's plan would curtail a practice, known as provider taxes, that nearly every state has used for decades to increase Medicaid payments to hospitals, nursing homes, and other providers and to private managed-care companies.
States often use the federal money generated through the taxes to pay the institutions more than Medicaid would otherwise pay. (Medicaid generally pays the lowest fees for care, compared with Medicare, the program for people over 65 and some with disabilities, and private insurance.)
Hospitals and nursing homes say they use these extra Medicaid dollars to expand or add new services and improve care for all patients.
Rural hospitals typically operate on thin profit margins and rely on Medicaid tax payments to sustain them. Researchers from the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research who examined the House bill concluded it would push more than 300 rural hospitals — many of them in Kentucky, Louisiana, California, and Oklahoma — toward service reductions or closure.
Republican senators tacked a $50 billion fund onto their version of the bill to cushion the blow to rural hospitals.
Harder To Get, and Keep, ACA Coverage
For those with ACA marketplace coverage, the GOP plan would make it harder to enroll and to retain their plans.
Marketplace policyholders would be required to update their income, immigration status, and other information each year, rather than be allowed to automatically reenroll — something more than 10 million people did this year. They would also have less time to enroll; the bill shortens the annual open enrollment period by about a month.
People applying for coverage outside that period — for instance because they lose a job or other insurance or need to add a newborn or spouse to an existing policy — would have to wait for all their documents to be processed before receiving government subsidies to help pay their monthly premiums. Today, they get up to 90 days of premium help during the application process, which can take weeks.
The legislation also does not call for an extension of more generous subsidies put in place during the covid pandemic. If Congress doesn't act, those enhanced subsidies will expire at year's end, resulting in premiums rising by an average of 75% next year, according to KFF.
On Medicaid? Pay More To See Doctors
Many Medicaid enrollees can expect to pay more out-of-pocket for appointments.
The bill would require states that have expanded Medicaid to charge enrollees up to $35 for some services if their incomes are between the federal poverty level (this year, $15,650 for an individual) and 138% of that amount ($21,597).
Medicaid enrollees often don't pay anything when seeking medical services because studies have shown charging even small copayments prompts low-income people to forgo needed care. In recent years, some states have added charges under $10 for some services.
The policy would not apply to people seeking primary care, mental health care, or substance abuse treatment. The Senate bill would allow states to enact even higher cost sharing for enrollees who seek emergency room care for nonemergencies. But if Medicaid patients fail to pay, hospitals and other providers could be left to foot the bill.
Cuts for Lawfully Present Immigrants
The GOP plan could cause at least hundreds of thousands of immigrants who are lawfully present — including asylum-seekers, victims of trafficking, and refugees — to lose their ACA marketplace coverage by cutting off the subsidies that make premiums affordable. The restriction would not apply to green-card holders.
Because the immigrants who would lose subsidies under this plan tend to be younger than the overall U.S. population, their exit would leave an older, sicker, and costlier population of marketplace enrollees, further pushing up marketplace premiums, according to marketplace directors in California, Maryland, and Massachusetts and health analysts.
Taking health care access away from immigrants living in the country legally "will do irreparable harm to individuals we have promised to protect and impose unnecessary costs on local systems already under strain," John Slocum, executive director of Refugee Council USA, an advocacy group, said in a statement.
Both the House and Senate versions of the bill reflect the Trump administration's restrictive approach to immigration. But because it ran afoul of Senate rules, the legislation won't include a proposal that would have reduced federal Medicaid payments to states like California that use their own money to cover immigrants without legal status.
KFF Health News chief Washington correspondent Julie Rovner contributed reporting.
Shorter enrollment periods. More paperwork. Higher premiums. The sweeping tax and spending bill signed Thursday by President Donald Trump includes provisions that would not only reshape people's experience with the Affordable Care Act but, according to some policy analysts, also sharply undermine the gains in health insurance coverage associated with it.
The moves affect consumers and have particular resonance for the 19 states (plus Washington, D.C.) that run their own ACA exchanges.
Many of those states fear that the additional red tape — especially requirements that would end automatic reenrollment — would have an outsize impact on their policyholders. That's because a greater percentage of people in those states use those rollovers versus shopping around each year, which is more commonly done by people in states that use the federal healthcare.gov marketplace.
"The federal marketplace always had a message of, ‘Come back in and shop,' while the state-based markets, on average, have a message of, ‘Hey, here's what you're going to have next year, here's what it will cost; if you like it, you don't have to do anything,'" said Ellen Montz, who oversaw the federal ACA marketplace under the Biden administration as deputy administrator and director at the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. She is now a managing director with the Manatt Health consulting group.
Millions — perhaps up to half of enrollees in some states — may lose or drop coverage as a result of that and other changes in the legislation combined with a new rule from the Trump administration and the likely expiration at year's end of enhanced premium subsidies put in place during the covid-19 pandemic. Without an extension of those subsidies, which have been an important driver of Obamacare enrollment in recent years, premiums are expected to rise 75% on average next year. That's starting to happen already, based on some early state rate requests for next year, which are hitting double digits.
"We estimate a minimum 30% enrollment loss, and, in the worst-case scenario, a 50% loss," said Devon Trolley, executive director of Pennie, the ACA marketplace in Pennsylvania, which had 496,661 enrollees this year, a record.
Drops of that magnitude nationally, coupled with the expected loss of Medicaid coverage for millions more people under the legislation Trump calls the "One Big Beautiful Bill," could undo inroads made in the nation's uninsured rate, which dropped by about half from the time most of the ACA's provisions went into effect in 2014, when it hovered around 14% to 15% of the population, to just over 8%, according to the most recent data.
Premiums would rise along with the uninsured rate, because older or sicker policyholders are more likely to try to jump enrollment hurdles, while those who rarely use coverage — and are thus less expensive — would not.
After a dramatic all-night session, House Republicans passed the bill, meeting the president's July 4 deadline. Trump is expected to sign the measure on Independence Day. It would increase the federal deficit by trillions of dollars and cut spending on a variety of programs, including Medicaid and nutrition assistance, to partly offset the cost of extending tax cuts put in place during the first Trump administration.
The administration and its supporters say the GOP-backed changes to the ACA are needed to combat fraud. Democrats and ACA supporters see this effort as the latest in a long history of Republican efforts to weaken or repeal Obamacare. Among other things, the legislation would end several changes put in place by the Biden administration that were credited with making it easier to sign up, such as lengthening the annual open enrollment period and launching a special program for very low-income people that essentially allows them to sign up year-round.
In addition, automatic reenrollment, used by more than 10 million people for 2025 ACA coverage, would end in the 2028 sign-up season. Instead, consumers would have to update their information, starting in August each year, before the close of open enrollment, which would end Dec. 15, a month earlier than currently.
That's a key change to combat rising enrollment fraud, said Brian Blase, president of the conservative Paragon Health Institute, because it gets at what he calls the Biden era's "lax verification requirements."
He blames automatic reenrollment, coupled with the availability of zero-premium plans for people with lower incomes that qualify them for large subsidies, for a sharp uptick in complaints from insurers, consumers, and brokers about fraudulent enrollments in 2023 and 2024. Those complaints centered on consumers' being enrolled in an ACA plan, or switched from one to another, without authorization, often by commission-seeking brokers.
In testimony to Congress on June 25, Blase wrote that "this simple step will close a massive loophole and significantly reduce improper enrollment and spending."
States that run their own marketplaces, however, saw few, if any, such problems, which were confined mainly to the 31 states using the federal healthcare.gov.
The state-run marketplaces credit their additional security measures and tighter control over broker access than healthcare.gov for the relative lack of problems.
"If you look at California and the other states that have expanded their Medicaid programs, you don't see that kind of fraud problem," said Jessica Altman, executive director of Covered California, the state's Obamacare marketplace. "I don't have a single case of a consumer calling Covered California saying, ‘I was enrolled without consent.'"
Such rollovers are common with other forms of health insurance, such as job-based coverage.
"By requiring everyone to come back in and provide additional information, and the fact that they can't get a tax credit until they take this step, it is essentially making marketplace coverage the most difficult coverage to enroll in," said Trolley at Pennie, 65% of whose policyholders were automatically reenrolled this year, according to KFF data. KFF is a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.
Federal data shows about 22% of federal sign-ups in 2024 were automatic-reenrollments, versus 58% in state-based plans. Besides Pennsylvania, the states that saw such sign-ups for more than 60% of enrollees include California, New York, Georgia, New Jersey, and Virginia, according to KFF.
States do check income and other eligibility information for all enrollees — including those being automatically renewed, those signing up for the first time, and those enrolling outside the normal open enrollment period because they've experienced a loss of coverage or other life event or meet the rules for the low-income enrollment period.
"We have access to many data sources on the back end that we ping, to make sure nothing has changed. Most people sail through and are able to stay covered without taking any proactive step," Altman said.
If flagged for mismatched data, applicants are asked for additional information. Under current law, "we have 90 days for them to have a tax credit while they submit paperwork," Altman said.
That would change under the tax and spending plan before Congress, ending presumptive eligibility while a person submits the information.
A white paper written for Capital Policy Analytics, a Washington-based consultancy that specializes in economic analysis, concluded there appears to be little upside to the changes.
While "tighter verification can curb improper enrollments," the additional paperwork, along with the expiration of higher premiums from the enhanced tax subsidies, "would push four to six million eligible people out of Marketplace plans, trading limited fraud savings for a surge in uninsurance," wrote free market economists Ike Brannon and Anthony LoSasso.
"Insurers would be left with a smaller, sicker risk pool and heightened pricing uncertainty, making further premium increases and selective market exits [by insurers] likely," they wrote.
The Trump administration has launched investigations into health care organizations in an effort to allow providers to refuse care for transgender patients on religious or moral grounds.
One of the most recent actions by the Department of Health and Human Services, launched in mid-June, targets the University of Michigan Health system over a former employee's claims that she was fired for requesting a religious exemption from providing gender-affirming care.
An administration release announcing the probe says the Michigan case is the third investigation in "a larger effort to strengthen enforcement of laws protecting conscience and religious exercise" for medical providers, citing federal laws known as the Church Amendments.
The probes are the first time HHS has explicitly claimed the amendments "allow providers to refuse gender-affirming care or to misgender patients," said Elizabeth Sepper, a professor at the University of Texas who studies conscience laws. Those laws, Sepper said, primarily allow objections to performing abortions or sterilizations but "don't apply to gender-affirming care, by their very own text."
But religious freedom groups that supported the health worker in the Michigan case, Valerie Kloosterman, say the investigation is a welcome recognition of existing protections for medical professionals to refuse to provide some types of care that conflict with their beliefs.
"We are pleased to learn that the Department of Health and Human Services is taking its responsibility seriously to enforce the federal statutes protecting religious health care providers," said Kloosterman's attorney Kayla Toney, of the First Liberty Institute, which advocates for religious liberty plaintiffs.
The two other cases HHS announced in recent months involve ultrasound technicians who didn't want to be involved in "abortion procedures contrary to their religious beliefs or moral convictions," and a nurse who asked for a religious exemption to "avoid administering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children," according to HHS. The department did not disclose the locations for those investigations.
Sepper said opening investigations into gender-affirming care cases is a new tactic for HHS after federal courts blocked a 2019 effort by the previous Trump administration to broaden conscience rules.
And it sends a message that this administration will "investigate or otherwise harass providers of gender-affirming care, even when that provision is legal in the states where they operate," said Sam Bagenstos, a general counsel at HHS during the Biden administration and a professor at the University of Michigan.
HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation.
HHS launched its investigation years after Kloosterman filed a lawsuit against her former employer. She started working for Metropolitan Hospital in Caledonia, Michigan, as a physician assistant in 2004. When the hospital merged to become part of University of Michigan Health-West in 2021, Kloosterman took part in a "mandatory diversity training," according to a federal lawsuit filed in 2022.
In that training and follow-up discussions, the health system "attempted to compel Ms. Kloosterman to pledge, against her sincerely held religious convictions and her medical conscience, that she would speak biology-obscuring pronouns and make referrals for ‘gender transition' drugs and procedures," according to the lawsuit by Kloosterman's attorneys.
These were, at this point, purely hypotheticals: "No patient ever asked her for a referral for such drugs or procedures, and she never used pronouns contrary to a patient's wishes," the suit claimed.
But when Kloosterman requested a religious accommodation, she was "summoned" to a meeting with administrators, who "called her 'evil' and a 'liar,' mockingly told her that she could not take the Bible or her religious beliefs to work with her, and blamed her for gender dysphoria-related suicides," according to the lawsuit, which alleges she was fired in August 2021, shortly after the meeting.
The health system denied all allegations, and in April 2024, U.S. District Judge Jane Beckering dismissed Kloosterman's case to proceed into arbitration. Kloosterman's lawyers filed an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. Appellate judges heard oral arguments in the case in February but have not issued a decision.
HHS initiated its investigation under the Church Amendments because it's "committed to enforcing Federal conscience laws in health care," said Paula M. Stannard, director of the department's Office for Civil Rights, in a statement announcing the investigation. "Health care workers should be able to practice both their professions and their faith."
But the investigation "represents a real expansion beyond what the Trump administration did in the first term, and also in terms of the text of the law," Sepper said.
The Church Amendments date to the 1970s and allow health care institutions and providers to refuse to participate in abortion or sterilization procedures.
"Some of these also apply to end-of-life care and to physician aid in dying. So they have relatively narrow scope," Sepper said. "They focus on a set of procedures. They don't allow health care providers or institutions to refuse to provide all kinds of care based on their religious or moral objections."
There is one broader provision in these laws that "is about the conscience-based decision to perform, or not to perform, a lawful medical procedure," said Bagenstos, the former HHS general counsel during the Biden administration. But that applies only to recipients of a "grant or contract for biomedical or behavioral research," he said. So this case is "an extreme stretch of the conscience protections, and probably more than a stretch."
But Ismail Royer, director of Islam and religious freedom at the Religious Freedom Institute, which filed an amicus brief supporting Kloosterman's lawsuit, said the Church Amendments are just a few of the laws HHS enforces, along with broad civil rights protections and laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of religion.
"This is not a case where someone is refusing to treat someone who is LGBT," Royer said. "This is a case of someone who does not believe that they should be forced to use pronouns that would constitute a lie."
Other providers are available if a patient's "feelings are hurt," he said. "But hurt feelings do not constitute the basis for the government violating our constitutional rights."
The stakes for a health system are very different in an HHS investigation than in civil suits, Sepper said. The government agency, which oversees the vast majority of health care spending, could decide to strip Medicare and Medicaid funding from the health system. HHS has previously been hesitant to remove funding, Sepper said.
But it would be highly unusual — and possibly illegal — for HHS to actually withhold funding from the health system over a case like this, Bagenstos said.
By taking up these investigations so publicly, Sepper said, HHS is putting health systems "in a very difficult situation." Antidiscrimination laws require them to treat transgender patients equally, she said. But now the administration is prioritizing "employees that might want to make it more difficult for transgender patients to receive care."
These investigations are "meant to offer red meat to the anti-LGBT rights movement, to tell them that HHS is squarely on their side," Sepper said.
The budget reconciliation process is how nearly every major piece of health legislation has passed Congress since the 1980s.
President Donald Trump's "One Big Beautiful" budget reconciliation bill would make some of the most sweeping changes in health policy in years, largely affecting Medicaid and Affordable Care Act plans — with reverberations felt throughout the health care system.
With only a few exceptions, the budget reconciliation process — which allows the political party in control to pass a bill with only 51 votes in the Senate, rather than the usual 60 — is how nearly every major piece of health legislation has passed Congress since the 1980s.
But using reconciliation to constrict rather than expand health coverage, as the GOP is attempting now? That is unusual.
One of the best-known programs born via reconciliation is the "COBRA" health insurance continuation, which allows people who leave jobs with employer-provided insurance to keep it for a time, as long as they pay the full premium.
That is one of dozens of health provisions tucked into COBRA, or the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985. Also included was the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which requires hospitals that take Medicare to treat or transfer patients with medical emergencies, regardless of their insurance status — a law that's become a focus of abortion opponents as they seek to limit access to the procedure.
A key reason so much health policy has passed this way has to do with how Congress manages the federal budget. Federal government spending falls into two categories: mandatory, or spending required by existing law, and discretionary, which traditionally is allocated and renewed each year as part of the appropriations process.
Lawmakers use the reconciliation process to make changes to mandatory spending programs — Medicare and Medicaid are among the largest — as well as tax policy. (For complicated political reasons, reconciliation bills cannot touch Social Security, the last prong in the entitlement program trifecta.)
Reconciliation comes into play only if it is needed to reconcile taxes or mandatory spending to comply with the terms Congress sets for itself each year, through the annual budget resolution. This year the GOP's focus is finding the cash to renew Trump's expiring tax cuts, which largely benefit wealthier Americans, and boost military and border security spending.
In years when Congress orders a reconciliation bill, health policy almost always plays a major part. Usually, reconciliation instructions call for reductions in payments to health providers under Medicare — which costs the most of the federal health programs.
For much of the 1980s and 1990s, Democrats in Congress quietly used reconciliation to expand eligibility for the Medicaid program, often by cutting more than the budget called for from Medicare. For every $5 cut from Medicare, about $1 would be redirected to provide Medicaid to more low-income people.
But budget reconciliation has also become a convenient way to make policy changes to the nation's major health programs, as it is usually considered a "must-pass" bill likely to be signed by the president and not subject to filibuster in the Senate.
As a result, all manner of now-familiar health programs were created by budget reconciliation bills, many of which provided health coverage to more Americans.
Children's health has been a popular add-on over the years, including the gradual expansion of Medicaid coverage to more children based on family income. The 1993 reconciliation bill created the Vaccines for Children program, which ensures the availability and affordability of vaccines nationwide for uninsured and underinsured kids. The 1997 reconciliation bill created the Children's Health Insurance Program, which today provides insurance to more than 7 million children.
In fact, the list of major health bills of the past 50 years not passed using budget reconciliation is short. For instance, the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, which added a prescription drug benefit to the program for the first time, attracted just enough bipartisan support to pass on its own.
The biggest health care law of recent decades — the Affordable Care Act — didn't start out as a reconciliation bill, but it ended up using the process to clear its final hurdles.
After initial passage of the bill in December 2009, a special election cost Democrats their 60th seat in the Senate — and with it, the supermajority they needed to pass the bill without Republican votes. In the end, the two chambers used a separate reconciliation measure, the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, to negotiate a compromise that included the ACA.
HealthBent, a regular feature of KFF Health News, offers insight into and analysis of policies and politics from KFF Health News chief Washington correspondent Julie Rovner, who has covered health care for more than 30 years.
More than 800,000 immigrants and naturalized citizens comprise 28% of direct care employees at home care agencies and long-term care companies.
This article was published on Thursday, June 26, 2025 in KFF Health News.
In a top-rated nursing home in Alexandria, Virginia, the Rev. Donald Goodness is cared for by nurses and aides from various parts of Africa. One of them, Jackline Conteh, a naturalized citizen and nurse assistant from Sierra Leone, bathes and helps dress him most days and vigilantly intercepts any meal headed his way that contains gluten, as Goodness has celiac disease.
"We are full of people who come from other countries," Goodness, 92, said about Goodwin House Alexandria's staff. Without them, the retired Episcopal priest said, "I would be, and my building would be, desolate."
The long-term health care industry is facing a double whammy from President Donald Trump's crackdown on immigrants and the GOP's proposals to reduce Medicaid spending. The industry is highly dependent on foreign workers: More than 800,000 immigrants and naturalized citizens comprise 28% of direct care employees at home care agencies, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and other long-term care companies.
But in January, the Trump administration rescinded former President Joe Biden's 2021 policy that protected health care facilities from Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. The administration's broad immigration crackdown threatens to drastically reduce the number of current and future workers for the industry. "People may be here on a green card, and they are afraid ICE is going to show up," said Katie Smith Sloan, president of LeadingAge, an association of nonprofits that care for older adults.
Existing staffing shortages and quality-of-care problems would be compounded by other policies pushed by Trump and the Republican-led Congress, according to nursing home officials, resident advocates, and academic experts. Federal spending cuts under negotiation may strip nursing homes of some of their largest revenue sources by limiting ways states leverage Medicaid money and making it harder for new nursing home residents to retroactively qualify for Medicaid. Care for 6 in 10 residents is paid for by Medicaid, the state-federal health program for poor or disabled Americans.
"We are facing the collision of two policies here that could further erode staffing in nursing homes and present health outcome challenges," said Eric Roberts, an associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
The industry hasn't recovered from covid-19, which killed more than 200,000 long-term care facility residents and workers and led to massive staff attrition and turnover. Nursing homes have struggled to replace licensed nurses, who can find better-paying jobs at hospitals and doctors' offices, as well as nursing assistants, who can earn more working at big-box stores or fast-food joints. Quality issues that preceded the pandemic have expanded: The percentage of nursing homes that federal health inspectors cited for putting residents in jeopardy of immediate harm or death has risen alarmingly from 17% in 2015 to 28% in 2024.
In addition to seeking to reduce Medicaid spending, congressional Republicans have proposed shelving the biggest nursing home reform in decades: a Biden-era rule mandating minimum staffing levels that would require most of the nation's nearly 15,000 nursing homes to hire more workers.
The long-term care industry expects demand for direct care workers to burgeon with an influx of aging baby boomers needing professional care. The Census Bureau has projected the number of people 65 and older would grow from 63 million this year to 82 million in 2050.
In an email, Vianca Rodriguez Feliciano, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said the agency "is committed to supporting a strong, stable long-term care workforce" and "continues to work with states and providers to ensure quality care for older adults and individuals with disabilities." In a separate email, Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, said foreigners wanting to work as caregivers "need to do that by coming here the legal way" but did not address the effect on the long-term care workforce of deportations of classes of authorized immigrants.
Goodwin Living, a faith-based nonprofit, runs three retirement communities in northern Virginia for people who live independently, need a little assistance each day, have memory issues, or require the availability of around-the-clock nurses. It also operates a retirement community in Washington, D.C. Medicare rates Goodwin House Alexandria as one of the best-staffed nursing homes in the country. Forty percent of the organization's 1,450 employees are foreign-born and are either seeking citizenship or are already naturalized, according to Lindsay Hutter, a Goodwin spokesperson.
"As an employer, we see they stay on with us, they have longer tenure, they are more committed to the organization," said Rob Liebreich, Goodwin's president and CEO.
Jackline Conteh spent much of her youth shuttling between Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ghana to avoid wars and tribal conflicts. Her mother was killed by a stray bullet in her home country of Liberia, Conteh said. "She was sitting outside," Conteh, 56, recalled in an interview.
Conteh was working as a nurse in a hospital in Sierra Leone in 2009 when she learned of a lottery for visas to come to the United States. She won, though she couldn't afford to bring her husband and two children along at the time. After she got a nursing assistant certification, Goodwin hired her in 2012.
Conteh said taking care of elders is embedded in the culture of African families. When she was 9, she helped feed and dress her grandmother, a job that rotated among her and her sisters. She washed her father when he was dying of prostate cancer. Her husband joined her in the United States in 2017; she cares for him because he has heart failure.
"Nearly every one of us from Africa, we know how to care for older adults," she said.
Her daughter is now in the United States, while her son is still in Africa. Conteh said she sends money to him, her mother-in-law, and one of her sisters.
In the nursing home where Goodness and 89 other residents live, Conteh helps with daily tasks like dressing and eating, checks residents' skin for signs of swelling or sores, and tries to help them avoid falling or getting disoriented. Of 102 employees in the building, broken up into eight residential wings called "small houses" and a wing for memory care, at least 72 were born abroad, Hutter said.
Donald Goodness grew up in Rochester, New York, and spent 25 years as rector of The Church of the Ascension in New York City, retiring in 1997. He and his late wife moved to Alexandria to be closer to their daughter, and in 2011 they moved into independent living at the Goodwin House. In 2023 he moved into one of the skilled nursing small houses, where Conteh started caring for him.
"I have a bad leg and I can't stand on it very much, or I'd fall over," he said. "She's in there at 7:30 in the morning, and she helps me bathe." Goodness said Conteh is exacting about cleanliness and will tell the housekeepers if his room is not kept properly.
Conteh said Goodness was withdrawn when he first arrived. "He don't want to come out, he want to eat in his room," she said. "He don't want to be with the other people in the dining room, so I start making friends with him."
She showed him a photo of Sierra Leone on her phone and told him of the weather there. He told her about his work at the church and how his wife did laundry for the choir. The breakthrough, she said, came one day when he agreed to lunch with her in the dining room. Long out of his shell, Goodness now sits on the community's resident council and enjoys distributing the mail to other residents on his floor.
"The people that work in my building become so important to us," Goodness said.
While Trump's 2024 election campaign focused on foreigners here without authorization, his administration has broadened to target those legally here, including refugees who fled countries beset by wars or natural disasters. This month, the Department of Homeland Security revoked the work permits for migrants and refugees from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela who arrived under a Biden-era program.
"I've just spent my morning firing good, honest people because the federal government told us that we had to," Rachel Blumberg, president of the Toby & Leon Cooperman Sinai Residences of Boca Raton, a Florida retirement community, said in a video posted on LinkedIn. "I am so sick of people saying that we are deporting people because they are criminals. Let me tell you, they are not all criminals."
At Goodwin House, Conteh is fearful for her fellow immigrants. Foreign workers at Goodwin rarely talk about their backgrounds. "They're scared," she said. "Nobody trusts anybody." Her neighbors in her apartment complex fled the U.S. in December and returned to Sierra Leone after Trump won the election, leaving their children with relatives.
"If all these people leave the United States, they go back to Africa or to their various countries, what will become of our residents?" Conteh asked. "What will become of our old people that we're taking care
Nearly seven months after the fatal shooting of an insurance CEO in New York drew widespread attention to health insurers' practice of denying or delaying doctor-ordered care, the largest U.S. insurers agreed Monday to streamline their often cumbersome preapproval system.
Dozens of insurance companies, including Cigna, Aetna, Humana, and UnitedHealthcare, agreed to several measures, which include making fewer medical procedures subject to prior authorization and speeding up the review process. Insurers also pledged to use clear language when communicating with patients and promised that medical professionals would review coverage denials.
While Trump administration officials applauded the insurance industry for its willingness to change, they acknowledged limitations of the agreement.
"The pledge is not a mandate," Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said during a news conference. "This is an opportunity for the industry to show itself."
Oz said he wants insurers to eliminate preapprovals for knee arthroscopy, a common, minimally invasive procedure to diagnose and treat knee problems. Chris Klomp, director of the Center for Medicare at CMS, recommended prior authorization be eliminated for vaginal deliveries, colonoscopies, and cataract surgeries, among other procedures. Health insurers said the changes would benefit most Americans, including those with commercial or private coverage, Medicare Advantage, and Medicaid managed care.
The insurers have also agreed that patients who switch insurance plans may continue receiving treatment or other health care services for 90 days without facing immediate prior authorization requirements imposed by their new insurer.
But health policy analysts say prior authorization — a system that forces some people to delay care or abandon treatment — may continue to pose serious health consequences for affected patients. That said, many people may not notice a difference, even if insurers follow through on their new commitments.
"So much of the prior authorization process is behind the black box," said Kaye Pestaina, director of the Program on Patient and Consumer Protections at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.
Often, she said, patients aren't even aware that they're subject to prior authorization requirements until they face a denial.
"I'm not sure how this changes that," Pestaina said.
The pledge from insurers follows the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was shot in midtown Manhattan in early December on the way to an investor meeting, forcing the issue of prior authorization to the forefront.
Oz acknowledged "violence in the streets" prompted Monday's announcement. Klomp told KFF Health News that insurers were reacting to the shooting because the problem has "reached a fever pitch." Health insurance CEOs now move with security details wherever they go, Klomp said.
"There's no question that health insurers have a reputation problem," said Robert Hartwig, an insurance expert and a clinical associate professor at the University of South Carolina.
The pledge shows that insurers are hoping to stave off "more draconian" legislation or regulation in the future, Hartwig said.
But government interventions to improve prior authorization will be used "if we're forced to use them," Oz said during the news conference.
"The administration has made it clear we're not going to tolerate it anymore," he said. "So either you fix it or we're going to fix it."
Here are the key takeaways for consumers:
1. Prior authorization isn't going anywhere.
Health insurers will still be allowed to deny doctor-recommended care, which is arguably the biggest criticism that patients and providers level against insurance companies. And it isn't clear how the new commitments will protect the sickest patients, such as those diagnosed with cancer, who need the most expensive treatment.
2. Reform efforts aren't new.
Most states have already passed at least one law imposing requirements on insurers, often intended to reduce the time patients spend waiting for answers from their insurance company and to require transparency from insurers about which prescriptions and procedures require preapproval. Some states have also enacted "gold card" programs for doctors that allow physicians with a robust record of prior authorization approvals to bypass the requirements.
Nationally, rules proposed by the first Trump administration and finalized by the Biden administration are already set to take effect next year. They will require insurers to respond to requests within seven days or 72 hours, depending on their urgency, and to process prior authorization requests electronically, instead of by phone or fax, among other changes. Those rules apply only to certain categories of insurance, including Medicare Advantage and Medicaid.
Beyond that, some insurance companies committed to improvement long before Monday's announcement. Earlier this year, UnitedHealthcare pledged to reduce prior authorization volume by 10%. Cigna announced its own set of improvements in February.
3. Insurance companies are already supposed to be doing some of these things.
For example, the Affordable Care Act already requires insurers to communicate with patients in plain language about health plan benefits and coverage.
But denial letters remain confusing because companies tend to use jargon. For instance, AHIP, the health insurance industry trade group, used the term "non-approved requests" in Monday's announcement.
Insurers also pledged that medical professionals would continue to review prior authorization denials. AHIP claims this is "a standard already in place." But recent lawsuits allege otherwise, accusing companies of denying claims in a matter of seconds.
4. Health insurers will increasingly rely on artificial intelligence.
Health insurers issue millions of denials every year, though most prior authorization requests are quickly, sometimes even instantly, approved.
The use of AI in making prior authorization decisions isn't new — and it will probably continue to ramp up, with insurers pledging Monday to issue 80% of prior authorization decisions "in real-time" by 2027.
"Artificial intelligence should help this tremendously," Rep. Gregory Murphy (R-N.C.), a physician, said during the news conference.
"But remember, artificial intelligence is only as good as what you put into it," he added.
Results from a survey published by the American Medical Association in February indicated 61% of physicians are concerned that the use of AI by insurance companies is already increasing denials.
5. Key details remain up in the air.
Oz said CMS will post a full list of participating insurers this summer, while other details will become public by January.
He said insurers have agreed to post data about their use of prior authorization on a public dashboard, but it isn't clear when that platform will be unveiled. The same holds true for "performance targets" that Oz spoke of during the news conference. He did not name specific targets, indicate how they will be made public, or specify how the government would enforce them.
While the AMA, which represents doctors, applauded the announcement, "patients and physicians will need specifics demonstrating that the latest insurer pledge will yield substantive actions," the association's president, Bobby Mukkamala, said in a statement. He noted that health insurers made "past promises" to improve prior authorization in 2018.
Meanwhile, it also remains unclear what services insurers will ultimately agree to release from prior authorization requirements.
Patient advocates are in the process of identifying "low-value codes," Oz said, that should not require preapproval, but it is unknown when those codes will be made public or when insurers will agree to release them from prior authorization rules.
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