Cantwell, Newhouse discuss budget impacts on Medicaid

MOSES LAKE — If Congress makes cuts to Medicaid, the results could be disastrous for Central and Eastern Washington, Sen. Maria Cantwell said at town hall meetings in Spokane and Richland last week. 

“This is a tsunami of cuts coming at the people of Washington and the United States of America,” Cantwell, D-Wash., said. “And I guarantee you, this is not a drill.” 

The cuts Cantwell was referring to haven’t actually happened yet and may well not happen at all, said U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Wash., who represents Washington’s Fourth District including all of Grant County and the Othello area of Adams County. The Congressional budget resolution the U.S. House of Representatives passed Feb. 25 is a long way from the final budget and makes no mention of Medicaid. The Senate still has to vote on its own version of the budget resolution, then both houses will have to wrangle out the specifics before the budget is finalized.  

“I don’t think that number (in the House budget resolution) is going to stay the same,” Newhouse said Thursday. “There’s going to be a compromise between the houses, and I don’t know what that number will be.” 

The House budget resolution tasks the House Energy and Commerce Committee with finding a way to reduce projected spending by $880 billion over the next 10 years. Medicaid is the largest federal program the committee has jurisdiction over and trimming that much spending without touching Medicaid would be a challenge. Also, under the auspices of the Energy and Commerce Committee is the smaller Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP.  

According to a letter from the Congressional Budget Office to the House, the federal outlay for Medicaid is expected to increase between 2025 and 2034 by 4-6% each year and total more than $8 trillion over those 10 years. A cut in spending on Medicaid would not result in spending going down from one year to the next; it would merely lessen the rate at which the spending rises, according to an analysis by the Empire Center for Public Policy, a non-partisan think tank in New York. 

Medicaid is an important source of health care funding in Washington, as both Cantwell and Newhouse said. 

“Nearly two million people in our state are on Apple Health (which is) our state Medicaid plan,” Cantwell said. “When we expanded the Affordable Care Act, our Medicaid expansion, we added hundreds of thousands of Washingtonians that got better access to care and helped drive down health care costs by not having these people show up in uncompensated care at our hospitals.” 

Medicaid funded $3.3 billion of hospital care in Washington, Cantwell added. According to data released by her office, 58% of reimbursements to Othello Community Hospital come from Medicaid. That figure is 30% for Samaritan Hospital and 27% for Columbia Basin Hospital.  

“(The budget resolution doesn’t) necessarily translate into reductions for Medicaid services, or … kicking people off the Medicaid program.” Newhouse said. “That’s not the goal. The goal is to make sure that all all the programs that we manage in government are done as efficiently as possible … Almost 40% of the people who live in the Fourth District utilize Medicaid, so I'm very well aware of the impact that some of the worst-case scenario decisions can have on people that I represent.” 

The key isn’t to cut out services or decrease the number of people who benefit from it, Newhouse said; it’s to make more efficient use of the money. 

“We are, as a country, $37 trillion in debt,” Newhouse said. “We’ve got to make sure we’re running the government as smartly as possible.” 

    Newhouse