Please note: This alert is designed for constituents of 12 Representatives who signed a letter to House leadership expressing concerns about Medicaid cuts. If this was forwarded to you, and you are not a constituent of one of those 12 officials, you will receive an error message.

Your member of Congress needs encouragement to keep defending Medicaid, which is the largest single payer for mental health services and behavioral health services in the nation. Your member of Congress is one of 12 Representatives who signed a letter expressing concerns about proposed funding cuts to Medicaid. Please urge them to stand their ground in the face of heavy political pressure, and oppose proposals that would drastically cut Medicaid funding. They need to hear from their constituents today as these conversations are moving fast in Congress!

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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