Tell Your Senators to Protect Medicaid from Budget Reconciliation Cuts!

Both the Senate and the House of Representatives have passed budget resolutions for Fiscal Year 2025. These two bills now need to be integrated into a single bill through a process known as budget reconciliation, a legislative process that allows certain budget-related bills to pass in the Senate with a simple majority (51 or more “yes” votes), avoiding the typical 60-vote filibuster threshold. This process is limited to legislation that directly affects federal revenue (taxes), spending, or the debt limit. Learn more about budget reconciliation here. 

There are several key differences between the Senate and House budget resolutions, including:

• The Senate bill is part one of a two-part plan, while the House bill (H.Con.Res.14) is a single-part bill
• In the Senate, the first bill addresses border and defense spending, energy production, and small spending cuts, while a later bill will address healthcare, tax cuts, and other spending cuts
• In the House, the bill includes instructions to committees on health, border, defense, energy, etc., and extends tax cuts at a cost of $4.5 trillion (with the full amount being contingent on achieving $2 trillion in cuts)

In order to achieve the $2 trillion in tax cuts proposed in the House bill, they needed to create offsetting reductions in other areas of federal spending. The most concerning of these cuts is an $880 billion reduction in spending for the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Medicare and Medicaid programs, among others. While House leadership made a point to avoid using Medicaid by name within the legislation, Medicaid is the only program left under the Committee’s jurisdiction that is large enough to accommodate the proposed savings, as the President gave explicit instruction not to cut from the Medicare program.

The consequences of passing the House bill as it stands currently (as opposed to the Senate bill) would inevitably result in drastic cuts to the Medicaid program that would create barriers to physical and mental health coverage and reduce critical services for the 72 million Americans who depend on it. 

This is where we need your help.

As the Senate prepares to negotiate and vote on a reconciled funding bill, it is crucial that Senators hear that their constituents are strongly opposed to possible cuts to the Medicaid program that would jeopardize physical and mental health care access for millions of Americans.

Join us in taking action to protect Medicaid today!