Cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, sometimes called food stamps) are inevitable if Congress and President Trump continue down the budget path they have laid out. Despite President Trump’s claim that he is opposed to cutting Medicaid, he enthusiastically endorsed the budget resolution passed by the House of Representatives in February. The Congressional Budget Office has confirmed that achieving the level of spending reductions specified in this resolution would require cuts to Medicaid (and more cuts on top of that). The House FY 2025 budget resolution calls for, among many other things, an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and requires $2 trillion in spending cuts. To pay for this, the budget resolution has asked House committees that oversee both Medicaid and the SNAP to identify hundreds of billions in potential cuts. The anticipated cuts to both Medicaid and SNAP threaten the economic security of millions of working families.
Medicaid provides health coverage to many low-income households, which include disabled residents, pregnant workers earning low wages, and low-income seniors, all of whom would be greatly harmed by cuts to this program. Workers of color and their families are especially vulnerable to cuts to Medicaid due to structural inequities that cause them to be overrepresented among low-income households. Cutting Medicaid and SNAP and extending the tax cuts from the TCJA would redistribute resources from the bottom of the income distribution towards the top. The bottom fifth of households by income would gain just 0.6% in income on average from the TCJA tax cuts and lose 7.4% from the Medicaid cuts (bringing their net loss to 6.8%), whereas the top 1% of households would see a net gain of 3.9% from these cuts.
Federal cuts to Medicaid follow a long history of political battles over publicly provided health coverage, with major implications for communities of color. The Affordable Care Act and its expansion of Medicaid helped reduce the nonelderly Black and Hispanic uninsured rate by more than 10 percentage points between 2010 and 2023. In fact, both Black and Hispanic individuals under the age of 65 recorded their lowest uninsured rate in 2023, at 9.7% and 17.9%, respectively. Still, many red states where much of the labor force is comprised of poorly paid Black and Hispanic workers have been unwilling to expand access to Medicaid. In 2023, after the end of the Medicaid re-enrollment provision that helped families and children remain insured throughout the pandemic, Black and Hispanic individuals were twice as likely as their white peers to lose coverage. Two years later, Black and Hispanic families stand to experience the brunt of the cuts once again.
People of color are more likely to rely on Medicaid for coverage
While non-Hispanic white individuals account for the largest number of Medicaid beneficiaries, Black and Hispanic individuals are more likely to depend on Medicaid for health coverage. In 2023, nearly a third of Black (29.0%) and Hispanic (29.6%) people relied on Medicaid for health insurance (see Figure A below). These figures amount to more than 13 million Black and more than 19 million Hispanic Medicaid recipients who stand to see a reduction in benefits as a result of Republican efforts in Congress to provide tax cuts that will disproportionately favor the most affluent households in the country at the expense of the most economically vulnerable.
Black and Hispanic individuals are more likely to rely on Medicaid for health insurance: Share of individuals on Medicaid by race and ethnicity, 2023
| Group | Share on Medicaid |
|---|---|
| Overall | 18.9% |
| White | 12.9% |
| Black | 29.0% |
| Asian | 17.4% |
| Hispanic | 29.6% |