The U. S. House of Representatives is now considering a radical budget and tax plan that would take health coverage and food assistance away from more than 100,000 Kentuckians, all to offset a fraction of the cost of cutting taxes for America’s wealthiest people and corporations. If passed, it would be the largest funding cut to both Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in history.
More than one in three Kentuckians use Medicaid to see a doctor or afford medicine, but the new House plan would make it harder to get, keep and use that health coverage. It includes:
- Burdensome work reporting requirements that put 197,000 to 282,000 Kentuckians at risk of terminated health coverage for those caught up in new red tape.
- Mandatory copays that would delay or prevent working class Kentuckians from getting needed care.
- More frequent checks for eligibility leading to needless coverage-ending mistakes.
- Cuts that make coverage options more expensive for those who purchase health insurance on kynect – adding thousands of dollars for many families.
SNAP, meanwhile, helps more than 575,000 Kentuckians afford their groceries. But this House plan would radically restructure the 50-year-old program by:
- Increasing red-tape requirements that will kick older people and parents off the program, putting 135,000 Kentuckians at risk for the first time.
- Shrinking SNAP by shifting up to $190 million in annual costs to the already-underfunded state budget, equal to the cost of hiring 2,354 Kentucky public school teachers.
- Preventing future benefit changes to match updated nutrition standards or a rapid rise in cost of food, as we’ve all experienced recently.
As a state where so many people are able to receive medical care and put food on the table because of these federal programs, Kentucky would be left sicker, hungrier and poorer by these cruel and unnecessary changes. The cuts will pass huge new costs down to Kentucky’s budget, potentially squeezing out state investments in everything from education to infrastructure. And the cuts will weaken our economy as well, especially in rural Kentucky.
Medicaid keeps the doors open at many hospitals. Cuts that result in terminated coverage or less care threaten the jobs of nurses and providers across the state. At the same time, SNAP stimulates local economies and supports jobs at farmers’ markets and grocery stores. In 2024, more than $1.3 billion in federal SNAP benefits went to more than 4,700 retailers across the state.
These cuts are being proposed in part because many politicians in Washington want to extend key parts of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy. The richest 1% in Kentucky would receive over $45,000 in annual tax cuts from those extensions, while the poorest 20% would get $70. The House bill also adds even more giveaways to the wealthy by further increasing the estate tax exemption, expanding the pass-through deduction loophole for super-rich investors, and creating a new tax credit for the exact kind of private school vouchers that Kentuckians roundly rejected in the Amendment 2 vote last year.
And that’s just some of the dangerous changes in this plan. The proposal also hurts immigrants and their U. S. citizen children, makes the cost of student loans go up and denies the full child tax credit for the very poorest kids who would benefit the most from the added income. It kills energy tax breaks that have helped fuel new jobs at battery plants and power installations all across Kentucky.
Taken as a whole, the House plan is a recipe for greater hardship and the redistribution of wealth from hard-working Kentuckians and their kids to the pockets of the richest people in our country.
This column was published by the Lexington Herald-Leader on May 15 and the Kentucky Lantern on May 16.
