GOP War on Health Care Destroying Hospitals at Home and Abroad

[Celerity]

More than 800 health care facilities are at risk or have already closed since Republicans severely cut funding last year. The worst is still ahead.

https://prospect.org/2026/04/07/health-care-hospital-closure-trump-republicans-big-beautiful-bill-medicare-medicaid/



As the Trump administration bombs hospitals across the Middle East, it’s blowing them up throughout the United States, too. Since the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, more than 800 hospitals, nursing homes, maternal wards, psychiatric centers, and other health care facilities across the country have either closed entirely, cut services, or are at risk of doing so, according to a Protect Our Care report released last week.

That is the early consequence of the law’s more than $1 trillion in health care cuts, money that has been reallocated to pay for tax breaks for billionaires, disastrous and deadly immigration raids in Minnesota and across the country, a coup in Venezuela, and the even more disastrous war on Iran and its neighbors, conducted jointly with Israel. The biggest reductions are yet to come, timed to hit after the midterm elections. A new work requirement that forces Medicaid recipients who aren’t disabled to report 80 hours a month of work will begin in 2027, for example. Cuts to funding that states use to cover the cost of their Medicaid programs will begin in 2028.

“We’re going to see the whole situation amplified on an exponential basis,” Protect Our Care’s director of policy programs, Vaishu Jawahar, said in an interview. The most harmed are people in rural areas, mothers, and seniors, she said, though the cuts will affect everyone, regardless of what type of insurance they have or whether their nearest hospital is open. “If you’re a patient in an emergency room, or a parent taking care of a loved one, or you’re taking care of a sick parent yourself, all of that is ten times harder and it is going to get worse,” Jawahar said.



The expectation of future cuts is driving the early damage, as hospitals must plan for a future with fewer insured patients and a loss of revenue. They’ve also been battered by the expiration of enhanced insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) last December, which has led to a dramatic drop in insured patients. And the carnage isn’t over, if Republicans have their way, with more cuts imagined in the next Trump budget and a possible second party-line funding bill that would provide money for the war in Iran.

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[erronis]

1. Mission being accomplished. Slowly but surely, strangling this experiment in democracy.

Thanks for this article from The Prospect. They are one of my favorite sources.