States face hard choices after major cuts to federal health care funding
PBS News Hour - Segments
PBS NewsHour
4.1 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 13 September 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | The Trump administration is planning sweeping cuts to health care funding across the country. |
| 0:05.8 | Some of those federal funding cuts have already taken effect. Others will be rolling out in the next |
| 0:10.3 | few years as President Trump's so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act is implemented. That law will |
| 0:16.4 | reduce what the federal government expects to spend on Medicaid by more than $900 billion |
| 0:21.6 | over a decade. KFF Health News looked at what that means for states, which will have to shoulder |
| 0:27.3 | more of the costs of health programs, and they found they're being forced to make tough choices |
| 0:32.1 | about what they can afford. Stephanie Armour is the senior health policy correspondent at |
| 0:36.8 | KFF News and joins me now. |
| 0:39.1 | Stephanie, first of all, help our viewers understand which of these health cuts have already happened and which ones are coming down the road. |
| 0:46.4 | That's actually a really important question because states are grappling with what's already happened. |
| 0:51.2 | They've already seen tens of millions of dollars cut. For example, |
| 0:56.0 | the Trump administration is clawing back about $11 billion just in funding that was given |
| 1:02.8 | to states to help them cope with the pandemic. And a number of states had earmarked those funds |
| 1:08.3 | for public health programs and now they're having to cut that. Also, |
| 1:12.6 | what's looming is even more troubling for states because it's about almost a trillion dollars |
| 1:18.7 | in reduced Medicaid spending is coming in the next, you know, year or two. So right now you're |
| 1:24.9 | seeing states grappling not only with the cuts that are happening right now, |
| 1:28.7 | but what are they going to do down the line? Your work has really looked at the ups and downs |
| 1:33.2 | across the country, and it varies by quite a lot. By your analysis, for example, Texas expects |
| 1:38.7 | to lose some $40 billion in Medicaid funding. Delaware's already seen almost 40 million in public health |
| 1:46.5 | funds cuts. What do you see as the most painful decisions going on out there right now? |
| 1:52.9 | Yeah, I think what's really hard for states right now is they were kind of going through |
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