Dive Brief:
- Proposed Medicaid cuts in the Senate version of a healthcare bill Republicans are touting to replace Obamacare could lay massive budget cuts on institutions with teaching hospitals that disproportionately serve low-income patients, potentially breeding further reduced support from state legislatures, according to Inside Higher Ed.
- Thomas Schwenk, the dean of the University of Nevada at Reno’s medical school, said that the state expansion of Medicaid that occurred after the passage of the Affordable Care Act allowed teaching hospitals “more sound financial footing” that enabled them to be more dependable centers of care.
- More than 14.4 million individuals attained care after Medicaid’s 2014 expansion, and research and focuses on other sub specialties of medicine could also be endangered by the cuts, as more uninsured patients would mean more financial risk and less available resources for teaching institutions to put toward those pursuits.
Dive Insight:
The potential impact of the replacement of the Affordable Care Act extends beyond higher ed teaching institutions. In many K-12 districts, schools and states could lose funding for special education services or mental health services, and the loss of Medicaid could have a particularly drastic impact on schools in communities with a higher percentage of low-income families. The loss of insurance could exacerbate the stress placed upon a student’s family.
Leaders in higher ed and K-12 must be prepared to consider how these losses could impact students’ well-being, as well as be aware of how such developments could hinder student performance and potential, deeming it necessary to find alternative revenue sources that can help plug the gaps as much as possible.
On a state level, higher ed leaders could advocate for legislatures to pass provisions that may keep such protections and funding streams available for teaching hospitals in order to keep offering the level of coverage to low-income populations they have been able to since Medicaid’s expansion. School administrators and advocates could frame it as a question of cost, noting that support for the programs already in place could save legislators from a more substantive bill due if the Medicaid expansion is entirely revoked. This way, administrators can keep certain benefits of the Medicaid expansion alive, and politicians would be able to save themselves from facing voters with the prospect of enacting massive cuts to education in addition to previous cuts to health care.