Nearly one in five (17 percent) Asian Americans relied on Medicaid for health insurance coverage in 2023, according to CEPR’s analysis (Figure 1). Medicaid’s coverage includes children, retirees, and people with disabilities who may not be in the workforce. Among Asian American workers specifically, about one in ten (9.8 percent) rely on Medicaid for health insurance. Republican plans to cut Medicaid funds will result in millions of people losing health insurance, including many Asian Americans.

Medicaid saves lives and money. The expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act has been estimated to save over 27,000 lives since 2010. Among those who gained coverage, medical debt fell by over $1,000. Among Medicaid’s health benefits are that it “reduces the share of low-income adults screening positive for depression, improves diabetes and hypertension control, and reduces one-year mortality among patients diagnosed with end-stage renal disease.” As Jackson Griggs, the chief executive of Waco Family Medicine in Texas, put it, “When individuals have Medicaid, they seek care early in the right settings that are far better and less expensive than the emergency room.”

Given all these benefits of Medicaid, why are Republicans determined to cut funding for the program? In a nutshell: to help pay for tax cuts to the rich. For example, many Republicans in Congress hope to make the personal income tax changes from Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent. This tax cut would deliver two-thirds of its benefits to the richest fifth of taxpayers. The richest 1 percent would receive more than a quarter of the benefit. This increased wealth for the rich would be partially paid for with worse health outcomes for the poor.

Any politician seriously interested in reducing health care spending and protecting the health of the people of the United States would work to move the country toward a Western Europe health care model. In Western Europe, all citizens have access to better quality health care than in the United States – at about half the cost. The 4.2 percent of Asian American children and the 6.8 percent of Asian American adults without any health insurance would greatly benefit from this model.

This first appeared on CEPR.

The post How GOP Medicaid Cuts Will Harm Asian-Americans appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.