Proposed Medicaid Cuts
While primarily seen as a health care program, Medicaid also provides significant financial support to school districts for a variety of activities. As Congress works to enact a FY2018 federal budget and given the recent efforts to modify the Affordable Care Act, it is important to draw attention to the fact that cutting or changing Medicaid to a block grant program will have significant negative financial implications for school districts. These could have devastating effects on health care and educational programs that benefit the nation’s most vulnerable children (students with disabilities and those living in poverty), as well as threaten programs that benefit schools and local taxpayers. In fact, the proposed changes in Medicaid to become a block grant or a program with a per capita cap would cut Medicaid spending by $1 trillion (or one-third of the program’s budget) in the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The proposed 2018 federal budget could further impact Medicaid funding received by New York and all states, as it proposes to cut Medicaid funding by an additional $610 billion over the next decade.