How 7 states could thwart GOP plans to overhaul Medicaid

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

60% : In Idaho, for example, voters approved expanding Medicaid in 2018 with 61 percent support, extending coverage to about 90,000 more residents.
58% : There's currently a campaign underway in Florida to put expansion on the ballot in 2026, underscoring the popularity of Medicaid even in the most MAGA-friendly states.
52% : Hawley, who represents about 326,000 people who became eligible for Medicaid under the state's 2021 expansion, has said he wouldn't support "severe" cuts to Medicaid -- specifically cuts that would lead to reduced benefits -- calling it a "red line" for securing his vote.
49% : " Republicans face similar skepticism across red and purple swaths of the country where voters have used ballot initiatives to expand Medicaid since Congress last targeted the safety net health insurance program in 2017 - not only in South Dakota, but also in Idaho, Nebraska, Maine, Oklahoma, Missouri and Utah.
49% : The politics are especially tricky for representatives of more rural states where Medicaid has been a lifeline for hospitals struggling to keep the lights on -- hospitals that in some instances are among the state's biggest employers.
44% : And even there, he won an electoral vote by defeating Kamala Harris in the state's 2nd Congressional District, where nearly a third of people are enrolled in Medicaid.
44% : " "All this attention is being paid to Medicaid because that's the Democrats' talking point," Johnson said.
44% : " Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Susan Collins of Maine -- both of whom hail from states that expanded Medicaid by ballot measure -- crossed the aisle earlier this week to support a Democratic amendment to the Senate budget resolution that would have blocked tax cuts for the wealthy if any Medicaid funding is cut.
44% : But if federal funding for Medicaid decreases as a result of the current negotiations in Washington, the state legislature has the power to intervene and potentially repeal the expansion.
43% : Additional states could expand Medicaid in the coming years, making future rollbacks even more challenging.
43% : "Cutting Medicaid seems to be popular with some Republican elites and some right wing think tanks that are getting funded by some right wing billionaires, but they're unquestionably not popular with the Republican voters," Joan Alker, the executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy, told reporters at a briefing on Medicaid this week.
43% : And they're mulling a revival of some of the more aggressive tactics activists used to protest attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017.
41% : "We've seen many polls recently asking voters to rank what they wanted ... and cutting Medicaid was literally the last on the list for voters of all stripes.
38% : Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, which has enrolled more than 24,000 people in Medicaid since voters expanded the insurance program for low-income people in 2022, told POLITICO he's been arguing against some of his own party's proposals.
38% : "I have not heard anyone talking about cutting off Medicaid to people," he said.
37% : Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, where more than 245,000 people became eligible for coverage after the state voted to expand Medicaid in 2020, echoed Speaker Johnson's argument that the final budget would not impact individuals' health care benefits and said he hadn't heard from concerned citizens about it.
29% : " With pressure mounting to find hundreds of billions in savings, lawmakers who are usually on board with slashing government spending remain on high alert about the blowback they could face in their states over Medicaid.
26% : " Pro-expansion health care groups in these seven red and purple states mounted expensive and time-consuming ballot initiative campaigns to circumvent conservative state legislatures and governors who refused to expand Medicaid, and some of those same state officials are currently working to roll back the expanded coverage their constituents enacted.
25% : "That's a disaster, not only for the people on Medicaid, but for the people on private insurance," Rubel said.

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