With the House of Representatives proposing to set a target of reducing Medicaid spending by $880 billion over the next ten years, a reasonable question is “How would states do that?”

In a new report, KFF, a non-profit health policy research, polling, and news organization, evaluates the options for how states might respond to such cuts.

In its analysis, KFF evaluates how significantly $880 billion in Medicaid cuts might affect states’ budgets and then turns to the question of how states might offset those lost federal funds.  Among the options it evaluates are:

• increasing taxes to raise some or all the lost federal funding
• reducing spending for other state programs, including education – the largest category of spending for state governments
• reducing Medicaid eligibility
• reducing Medicaid benefits
• paying providers less

Reductions in Medicaid eligibility and/or benefits would be potentially disastrous for community safety-net hospitals such as those that belong to the Alliance of Safety-Net Hospitals, leaving those mission-driven providers delivering the same services to the same patients but without compensation.  Reduced payments to providers would have a similarly devastating impact on those hospitals.

Learn more about the questions KFF considered, how it performed its analysis, and the conclusions its research yielded in its report “Putting $880 Billion in Potential Federal Medicaid Cuts in Context of State Budgets and Coverage.”