The deep cuts to Medicaid outlined in President Trump’s budget reconciliation bill would hurt Americans suffering from conditions like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.) said Tuesday at The Hill’s “Matters of Life and Breath: Championing COPD Care” event.
COPD is a progressive lung disease that makes it difficult to breathe. It is often caused by prolonged exposure to smoke or air pollution and is one of the leading causes of death in the U.S., according to the American Lung Association.
“I believe we are setting ourselves up for a disaster,” Dexter said at Tuesday’s event, which was sponsored by AstraZeneca.
Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” proposes paying for expiring tax cuts by slashing Medicaid, the joint federal and state program that offers health insurance to low-income Americans.
The bill would reduce federal Medicaid spending by $793 billion over the next 10 years and would result in 10.3 million fewer people enrolling in the program by 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
That number also represents 1.3 million older people with Medicare who are known as “dual-eligible individuals,” according to the health care policy nonprofit KFF.
Dexter said she worries about how the proposed cuts would impact rural hospitals and their ability to provide care to her fellow Oregonians.
Rural hospitals typically have a slimmer profit margin than those located in urban areas since they tend to be smaller and able to see fewer patients. Medicaid is the “financial backbone” that keeps many of these hospitals operating, according to the Center for American Progress.
Dexter worries that some rural hospitals in Oregon will be forced to close if the budget reconciliation bill passes the Senate with the proposed Medicaid cuts. Those closures could force sick Oregonians to travel even farther to receive care or turn to already overwhelmed emergency rooms for urgent care, she said.
“This is a master plan on how to break a system,” Dexter said.
Grace Anne Dorney Koppel, president of the Dorney-Koppel Foundation, agreed with Dexter. Koppel has COPD herself.
She was diagnosed with COPD 24 years ago, and at the time, she was told by physicians that she only had a short time to live. Treatment for the condition has advanced since she was diagnosed more than two decades ago, but the Medicaid cuts proposed in Trump’s reconciliation bill threaten some of that progress, she said.
If passed, the bill will hurt COPD patients in low-income communities, particularly in states like Kentucky, Mississippi and West Virginia, which have high rates of the condition, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It will be a death blow,” Koppel said.
