Lawmakers must take action to make health care work for ALL of us
Contact: Margarida Jorge
[email protected]
202.422.2220
[Washington, DC]: Medicaid and Medicare, the nation’s best known and most popular health programs turn 61 years old today. Together, these programs insure about 147 million people including seniors, children, people with disabilities, and low-wage workers. Health Care for America Now Education Fund (HCANEF) is hosting a day of action today with events in 30 locations to educate Americans about the major changes to these programs under President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) and other Trump administration policies.
Trump’s OBBBA law made historic cuts to Medicaid funding totaling nearly $1 trillion. The cuts will have devastating effects over the coming years, including stripping 10 million people of coverage, forcing hospital, nursing home and health center closures and starving state budgets of federal funding they need for health, schools and public safety.
“After decades of success, Medicaid and Medicare have less to celebrate this year because President Trump and the Republican majority passed a law that gutted funding in order to offset the cost of tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations. In the same law that cuts Medicaid funding, these lawmakers extended tax breaks for wealthy households and also created new tax loopholes that reward health corporations for price-gouging us on care and coverage, “ said Maragarida Jorge, Executive Director of HCANEF.
HCANEF led a fifty state campaign to pass and implement the Affordable Care Act (ACA) from 2008-2014; expanding Medicaid and improvements to Medicare were included under the law. As Medicaid and Medicare reach a new milestone today, HCANEF partners across the country are urging the next Congress to leverage key lessons from the programs to more broadly reform the healthcare system. HCANEF’s “Make Health Care Work for All of Us” campaign, launching today as part of the day of action, taps into the growing demand among average Americans for health reform that finally tackles the root causes of affordability: price-gouging, profit and monopoly power among corporations that currently goes unchecked by Congress or government agencies.
“Our government has a duty to make health care work for all of us,” said Jorge. “We passed the Affordable Care Act to expand coverage and reduce costs as a first step. Now it’s time to take another step forward to fundamentally improve the system by reining in corporate power to set high prices and hike them at will. Every other country negotiates prices across the system rather than giving corporations unilateral control to set their own. In the U.S., the government negotiates rates in Medicare and Medicaid but that’s not enough. It’s time to expand price negotiations in ways that work for patients and consumers, not just for corporate profits because we will never get to affordable costs if we don’t tackle price.”
Health care affordability is a top issue going into this year’s midterm elections, with poll after poll showing high percentages of voters worried about the issue.
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Make Health Care Work for US is a new campaign of Health Care for America Now Education Fund (HCANEF), a 501c3 organization that supports quality, affordable and equitable health care for everyone in America as well as tax fairness policies that rein in profiteering and corporate greed. HCANEF has state partner organizations in 30 states and played a leading role in passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as well as passage of prescription drug reforms under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).