SACRAMENTO BEE: HOW MANY HEALTH CARE JOBS COULD CALIFORNIA LOSE IF TRUMP CUTS MEDICAID?

A new report from the UC Berkeley Labor Center, a program that advocates for working families, estimates California could lose between 109,000 to 217,000 jobs if U.S. leaders make anticipated cuts to Medicaid health insurance for very-low income people. Medicaid is called called Medi-Cal in California.

Laurel Lucia is the director of the Labor Center’s Health Care program, and the researcher of the report. She says the wide range is due to the “uncertainty about the specifics in terms of the Medicaid cuts.”

“This is kind of a first, a first stab at it,” she said. “It seemed important to give an order of magnitude estimate about the kind of job impacts we’re talking about.”

The report estimates that two-thirds of the job losses would come from direct health care settings, like hospitals, nursing homes, and in-home care, and the remaining third would occur in auxiliary sectors, like food and laundry services. Lucia’s projection anticipates California would see a cut of $10 to $20 billion in federal funding.

The fight over Medicaid has been heating up since the Republican Party told the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which oversees Medicaid, to make $880 billion in cuts over the next 10 years.

Since then, Democrats like Rep. Doris Matsui have highlighted the issue, and moderate Republicans have asked the committee to go easy on the program. For his part, President Donald Trump has said he won’t approve a bill that makes cuts to Medicaid.

We’ll know more about how the energy and commerce committee reconciles the competing priorities beginning next Wednesday, when the committee is expected to begin their “mark-up period.”

If cuts do come through, state leaders will need to consider whether they will backfill the holes left by federal funding.

“I hope that our counterparts in Congress do the right thing and don’t back stab their own constituents by taking health care and child care and food away from them, but we are preparing for a potentially very, very bad budget situation,” said state Senate Budget Chair Scott Wiener during a hearing earlier this month.

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