Many states' Medicaid programs have a different name, but local reporting is connecting the dots on One Big Beautiful Bill's massive cuts

On May 22, House Republicans passed their budget reconciliation omnibus — the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — which would cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid, among other spending cuts, in order to fund historic tax giveaways to the rich. 

Multiple independent analyses show that the final House version of OBBBA, which we used for this research, would result in up to 16 million Americans losing their current health insurance. Many of the losses will be due to losing eligibility for Medicaid coverage — and the Senate version, which passed on July 1, has even more drastic cuts to Medicaid. Also, rural hospitals in many states are at risk of closure due to the cuts, and multiple analyses predict tens of thousands of avoidable deaths annually due to the loss of health coverage from the cuts. Medicaid goes by many different names in different states (like Med-QUEST in Hawaii and KanCare in Kansas), so some recipients may not realize their programs are on the chopping blocks.

Media Matters looked at local news outlets across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., and found reports highlighting the dire consequences of the GOP legislation’s cuts to Medicaid. We’ve collected that reporting here and combined it with details on each state’s Medicaid programs, including the various names by which the programs are known.