A statement by Jason Bailey, executive director
The U.S. Senate on Tuesday passed a massive budget and tax bill that will strip health care and food assistance from millions of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians, while ensuring the wealthiest households benefit from a bounty of new tax cuts.
One in three Kentuckians receive health coverage through Medicaid, including children, seniors, low-wage workers and people with disabilities. Similarly, 562,000 Kentuckians receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food assistance to help afford groceries. These programs are essential to better health and are especially necessary in a time of rising household costs. They inject tens of billions of dollars into the Kentucky economy each year, creating jobs at grocery stores, hospitals and health clinics.
But the Senate bill makes harmful cuts to both, ensuring that doctor visits and groceries will be more difficult to afford for far too many, while also threatening the very existence of many rural hospitals and grocery stores. An estimated 210,000 Kentuckians would lose health coverage through cuts to Medicaid, 133,000 of whom live in rural areas, which is more than any other state. An additional 47,000 would lose coverage from kynect and become uninsured.
In addition, 50,000 Kentuckians would be newly at risk of losing SNAP food assistance due to ineffective work reporting requirements. Even more face lost food assistance because all states would be required, for the first time ever, to cover a portion of SNAP costs, pitting vital food assistance against investments in schools, health care, infrastructure and other needs.
Instead of vital programs like these, huge additional tax cuts for the wealthy are the priority in this bill. In Kentucky, the wealthiest 1% will get $45,960 a year on average. The already-rich, whose incomes are soaring, should hardly be the priority at a time when many Kentuckians are struggling. These tax cuts for the wealthy are so large, that despite unprecedented cuts to popular programs, Congress would still increase the U.S. debt by $3.3 trillion over ten years.
As Kentucky’s U.S. House delegation prepares to consider the Senate version of this bill, we urge the members to prioritize the vast majority of Kentuckians and oppose cuts to vital health care, food assistance, and education programs that are crucial to Kentuckians’ health and well-being and critical for our state’s economy.
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