Republican Study Committee's Medicaid Cuts Even Bigger Than Ryan Plan's

The House will vote today on a budget that the House Republican Study Committee has proposed as an alternative to Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s plan.  Our new analysis finds that the RSC plan:

proposes to end Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and also to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  In place of Medicaid and CHIP, states would receive a single block grant payment each year equal to the amount of federal Medicaid and CHIP funding that they received in 2012, with no adjustment for increases in health care costs or the size of the U.S. population, or even for general inflation.

Because the block grant would be frozen at 2012 levels and not adjust annually for increases in enrollment (e.g., as the population ages) or rising health care costs, the RSC budget would slash Medicaid funding by $1.1 trillion — or 30 percent — over the next ten years, relative to current law.  (This does not count the loss of the substantial additional federal Medicaid funding that states would receive under the ACA to expand Medicaid but that they wouldn’t receive under the RSC budget because it would repeal the ACA.)  By 2022, federal funding would be 47 percent below what states would otherwise receive through Medicaid that year.  These funding cuts are even larger than those required under the severe proposal to convert Medicaid to a block grant and sharply cut its funding included in the Ryan budget plan.  The Ryan block grant would cut federal Medicaid funding by $810 billion — or 22 percent — over the next ten years, with federal funding 34 percent lower by 2022 (not counting the additional cuts from repealing the ACA’s Medicaid expansion).

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