You have a unique opportunity to influence the current debate on Medicaid cuts, because you are a constituent of a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees key decisions on the future of the program. Congress has instructed House committees to come up with $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years to pay for a new tax bill, border enforcement, and defense.  The budget resolution directs the House Energy & Commerce Committee to develop legislation cutting $880 billion in spending. Achieving this level of savings will require deep cuts to Medicaid.  The Energy & Commerce Committee will be considering these cuts in a matter of days, so we need your action now!

It is critical that Congress REJECT drastic Medicaid cuts.  More than 1 in 3 adult Medicaid enrollees has a mental illness, and Medicaid is the single largest source of funding for behavioral health treatment in the U.S., accounting for a quarter of all such spending.  

Congress is considering:

• Instituting work requirements for receiving Medicaid coverage. Work requirements would disproportionately impact those with behavioral disorders. Research shows that Medicaid enrollees with mental illness are less than half as likely to have worked at least 20 hours in the past week as those without an identified health condition.  Many people with behavioral health disorders have intermittently recurring episodes of loss of functioning, making work difficult if not impossible.  Congress’s own budget office projects that work requirements would increase the number of people without health insurance without increasing employment, and in Georgia, implementing Medicaid work requirements resulted in almost five times as much spending on program administration as on healthcare for enrollees.
• Cutting spending for childless adults covered under Medicaid expansion.  Forty-one states provide Medicaid coverage to single, childless adults with incomes below $21,598 per year, with the federal government paying 90% of the coverage costs.  Congress is considering lowering this federal contribution rate, which in some states will automatically trigger the end of Medicaid expansion coverage (AZ, AR, IL, IN, MT, NH, NC, UT, VA), or the review of such coverage (IA, ID, NM). These states are known as “trigger states”.
• Placing a per capita cap on spending, either for the Medicaid expansion population or for other covered populations. This will ultimately harm patient outcomes by cobbling states’ ability to address emerging needs in the region, as by design per capita caps fail to keep pace with spending. By setting a fixed rate on spending, per capita caps remove states’ ability to rapidly adjust to and address unexpected health care crises in the state, such as the rapid explosion of drug overdoses or harms caused by natural disasters. It would also prevent states from affording new healthcare technologies or medicines as they come on the market. Additionally, in the trigger states listed above, per capita caps on the Medicaid expansion population are likely to automatically result in massive termination of coverage.   

If Congress chooses to cut funding for the program, states would be unable to make up for the lost federal dollars without cutting enrollment, or scaling back if not eliminating coverage for behavioral health and other optional services. Join us today to speak up for Medicaid funding! 

Additional Resources to Help You Personalize Your Message

Personalizing your message  - by either editing the subject line, or adding to or editing the text to add your own thoughts - will make it more memorable for Congressional staff and therefore greatly increase its impact. To help with that, you can find information relevant to your location and the field of psychology by…

• Visiting the Kaiser Family Foundation map, which shows Medicaid enrollment in U.S. states and congressional districts.
• Consulting state-by-state estimates of the impacts of Medicaid per-capita spending caps. 
• Reading this article on the likely effect of Medicaid cuts on access to behavioral health treatment.

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