Dear Senator Lee, Senator Curtis, Representative Moore, Representative Owens, Representative Maloy and Representative Kennedy,
As Congress looks for budget cuts in Medicaid at the federal level, we wanted to let you know that we oppose indiscriminate large cuts that would damage the Utahns who are served by Medicaid.
Medicaid is a life-saving and essential health care program. It covers thousands of Utah’s children, people with disabilities, people in long-term care and people with low income. This program plays a pivotal role in Utah’s health care system. It reimburses hospitals and health care providers for providing dental care, prenatal care and other vital health care services. Utah’s Medicaid program has been carefully tailored and structured by the Utah State Legislature and successive Utah governors. It is a program that strengthens Utah families and helps ensure that our state remains one of the healthiest and most economically successful states in the nation.
If there are abrupt large reductions in the federal government’s commitment to Medicaid, it will surely result in a loss of care for some of these Utahns, who do not have anywhere else to turn. In addition to injury that can occur when basic health care is not available, this loss of coverage will also cause emergency rooms to be burdened with providing uncompensated care when their health finally deteriorates to a breaking point. The cost of this care falls on our hospitals first and then is passed on to other Utahns in the form of higher insurance premiums. Hospitals (especially rural hospitals) and health care providers who are already stretched thin would face even more serious financial shortfalls.
If cuts to Medicaid are needed to ensure the program’s longer-term viability, we would ask that the cuts be done in such a way that coverage for basic medical services will still be available to poor Utahns. If work requirements are to be considered, please remember that a substantial number of Medicaid recipients have some significant situations in their lives that make employment difficult or unrealistic, such as duties to care for children, elderly parents or disabled family members. Some of them have a significant disabling medical condition but have not yet made it through our multi-year process to claim a formal disability designation. If work requirements are instituted, we hope they would be simple enough to follow and broad enough in definition to avoid resulting in loss of medical care for these kinds of individuals.
There are also other cost saving measures that can be instituted, such as indexing co-pays with inflation (which has not happened in many years) or implementing differential co-pays for emergency room visits versus urgent care visits — similar to what other private insurers do to help incentivize care to take place in appropriate medical settings — that could result in savings to the program while still getting people the basic care they need to stay healthy. Every area of the program should be looked at to see if there are overpayments or if there are services that are “nice to have” but not necessary for basic health, and those areas can and should be reduced while keeping essential care intact — but that means that the people doing the cutting need to be knowledgeable about the services provided and to still value the provision of basic medical care itself.
Utah voters chose to strengthen Medicaid in 2018, and Utah’s state government and Legislature have worked diligently to create a Medicaid program unique to Utah. Medicaid serves approximately 340,000 Utahns (almost exactly 1 in 10), half of whom are children. This means that almost everyone in Utah has benefited personally from being on Medicaid at some point in their life, or has family members or personal acquaintances who are currently benefiting from the program. Utah has the lowest percentage of people on Medicaid of any of the 50 states, but for those who have it, it is a vital lifeline to health care. Public opinion polls consistently show that both Republicans and Democrats support Medicaid and don’t want to see people they care for get cut off from access to medical care.
Damaging Medicaid with indiscriminate large reductions will not make America or Utah healthy or economically stronger. We urge you to oppose sweeping cuts and instead focus on targeted savings and a refocusing of the program to keep in place the basic medical services that Medicaid has successfully provided for so many years.
Representative Ray Ward
Representative Ariel Defay
Representative Cheryl Acton
Representative Christine Watkins
Representative Clint Okerlund
Representative Jim Dunnigan
Representative Logan Monson
Representative Steve Eliason
Representative Stewart Barlow
Senator Evan Vickers
Senator Todd Weiler