The cost of health care just keeps going up — and millions of Americans are set to lose coverage.
Under the GOP’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” around 17 million people in this country will lose health care thanks to the law’s Medicaid cuts, failure to renew Affordable Care Act subsidies, and other changes. Those cuts accelerate after this year’s midterms.
Instead, that money is going toward tax cuts for the rich plus record budgets for ICE and the Pentagon. Immigrants — including well over 1 million who are lawfully present — will be especially hard hit.
Rosa Maria Carranza fled El Salvador’s civil war for the United States decades ago, working here and sending money home to support her three children. She missed their milestones as she worked overnight shifts babysitting and substitute-teaching. Later, she co-founded a preschool.
Now semi-retired and working part-time, her livelihood depends on the Medicare and Social Security benefits she earned by paying taxes into the system for decades. Yet Carranza is now expected to lose Medicare coverage, according to KFF Health News.
Carranza is just one of the 100,000 lawfully present immigrants who are expected to be cut out of Medicare — and one of 1.4 million projected to lose their health care overall from other changes under the law, the Kaiser Family Foundation calculates. Meanwhile, intensified ICE raids have led many immigrants to avoid getting care for fear of being detained by ICE.
President Trump and many other MAGA Republicans tried to justify these deep health care cuts by accusing immigrants of taking care away from citizens. This is a lie — instead, millions of citizens are losing their own health care in part to fund ICE’s crackdown on immigrants.
Undocumented immigrants are not allowed to enroll for Medicaid and Medicare, and they’re ineligible to purchase health care through the Affordable Care Act Marketplace. Even before the Big Beautiful Bill, immigrants needed to have a “qualified” immigration status to be eligible for Medicaid — and most would still have to wait five years after gaining qualified status to enroll. While lawfully present immigrants can also qualify for Medicare, they first must have “sufficient” work history.
As a result of factors like these, lawfully present immigrants are more than three times as likely as U.S. citizens to be uninsured. And both lawfully present and undocumented immigrants use less health care due to higher uninsured rates, language barriers, and fear of ICE.
The Big Beautiful Bill will make this worse. The law restricts the definition of qualified immigrants who are eligible for Medicaid as well as Medicare, excluding legally present refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants on certain work visas, and others. And of course that’s alongside deep cuts to Medicaid itself that will cause millions of citizens to lose their coverage as well.
Even while immigrants are losing health care coverage, they continue to pay billions into the system. In 2022, immigrants paid $579 billion in taxes — including $96.7 billion from undocumented immigrants. Moreover, since immigrants are more likely to work in physically demanding jobs with lower wages and weaker benefits, they may have a greater need for the care they’re being systematically denied.
Cracking down on immigrants was never going to restore health care to U.S. citizens. In fact, since Medicaid cuts are helping to fund this ICE crackdown, it’s doing the opposite. Meanwhile, the extremely wealthy Americans who got their taxes cut by the same law can afford gold-plated health plans.
Addressing this country’s health inequities means closing our massive wealth gap, not scapegoating immigrants. There must be higher taxation on the wealthy so we can restore and expand health programs like Medicaid and Medicare.
Health care is a human right, rooted in the belief that every person deserves dignity and care, regardless of where they were born or what job they work. We must hold accountable those who promote harmful rhetoric that justifies the exclusion of immigrants, which ultimately only hurts all of us.
