Congressman Bergman:

I am sending the following to the Escanaba Daily Press as an added way to bring this concern to your attention.

The Wall Street Journal and other reputable sources report that the administration’s budget bill will deny working people and their children medical care, jeopardize the survival of local rural hospitals, and provide more money to the wealthy, thereby increasing the deficit by $3 trillion.

According to the Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy, 21% of all Delta County citizens are enrolled in Medicaid, including 37% of children and 15% of seniors. If Medicaid funding is cut, some of these citizens will lose their coverage.

The administration’s bill, as passed by the House, will cut $863,000,000,000.00 from Medicaid. The administration claims that work requirements will reduce the cost of Medicaid. Work requirements will not come close to saving $863,000,000,000.00. Arkansas and Georgia implemented work requirements and failed. Arkansas’ experiment with work requirements actually added $24 million to Arkansas’ Medicaid program.

The June 21st Wall Street Journal reported that most people on Medicaid who can work are working. State bureaucracies enforcing work requirements complicated reporting requirements that sowed confusion and led to dropping working people from Medicaid. Sometimes people who lose Medicaid coverage become too sick to work and lose their jobs.

The bill also puts people who are not enrolled in Medicaid at risk. When an uninsured person is treated in the emergency room, the hospital incurs financial losses. An Upper Peninsula native, Dr. Brad Uren, now an associate professor of emergency medicine at the U of M, authored a May 27th op-ed in the Detroit Free Press. He wrote that non-payments could risk closing rural hospitals. The administration’s budget will place 6 rural hospitals in imminent risk of closure and 14 more at risk over time. That is 31 % of Michigan’s rural hospitals. Dr. Uren wrote, “Tell your members of Congress not to cut Medicaid so we can protect the health care safety net in our state, for our friends and neighbors, for our hospitals, and for the safety net that protects all our residents.”

The June 12th Wall Street Journal reported that “Congress’s nonpartisan scorekeeper,” the Congressional Budget Office, said the administration’s bill intends to “give more money to middle-income and high-income households while taking benefits away from low-income pewill you do to keep our rural hospitals functioning? What do you have in mind to support our hospitals that will lose income when Medicaid is cut? What do you propose to do to support our rural health care?

Richard Clark

Escanaba