The U.S. House voted Thursday for final passage of a budget bill that will make basic needs like food and health care more expensive for millions of American families through severe cuts to food assistance, Medicaid and other human services. These funding cuts will finance renewals and expansions of tax cuts for wealthy people and highly profitable corporations.
“It’s wrong to hurt people who are struggling to help people who are already far ahead. But Congress just passed legislation that will do exactly that,” Alabama Arise executive director Robyn Hyden said. “This budget bill is not only a moral failure. It’s bad policy, and it is a really bad deal for Alabama and our entire country. It also will undermine important bipartisan progress that state policymakers made this year on food affordability and maternal health care.” Read our news release for more information on how these federal cuts will affect Alabama. |
The federal budget legislation includes deep cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), including an expansion of red-tape work reporting requirements and a cost shift that will require most states to pay for a portion of SNAP benefits for the first time. If states are unwilling or unable to provide that funding, they could reduce SNAP participation significantly, or even eliminate their food assistance program altogether. That could send hunger soaring for many or all of the more than 750,000 Alabamians who participate in SNAP, and it would undermine the benefits of the state grocery tax reduction that Alabama legislators enacted unanimously this year.
The budget plan also will lead to millions of Americans, including nearly 200,000 Alabamians, losing their health coverage due to Medicaid cuts and failure to renew enhanced tax credits for marketplace coverage under the Affordable Care Act. And the legislation will remove additional federal incentives for the first two years of Medicaid expansion that Alabama left on the table. That increases the chances that our state will continue to refuse to expand Medicaid, leaving hundreds of thousands of our neighbors stuck in the health coverage gap with no options to afford life-saving care.
“The human toll of cutting health coverage is all too real,” Hyden said. “Funding for health coverage is not just a line on a spreadsheet. It is often literally a matter of life or death for people facing medical challenges.”
Read our news release for more information on how federal cuts to food assistance and health care will harm families and communities across Alabama. |
