Reducing Medicaid Funding Is About To Increase Cancer Deaths

Woman receiving mammogram

getty

The Big Beautiful Budget significantly reduced funding for Medicaid. It is natural to think about these budget cuts in the abstract: this many dollars saved; this many people without health insurance.

But it is critical to think about this more concretely.

Due to these cuts, thousands of people will live with undetected cancers, these growths no longer discovered by routine screening tests. If that is not dire enough, many will die with otherwise treatable cancers that won’t be diagnosed until the cancers are beyond the reach of curative treatments.

I would get more specific if I could – I would tell you which people got cancer, and recount stories of their sufferings. But the budget cuts have not yet gone into full effect. And even when they do, we will never know which specific people die from lack of screening.

But we know that people will die. We even have a good idea of how many will die, thanks to models. Not the liposuctioned, Botoxed-kind of models, of course, but statistical simulations that estimate: how many people will lose insurance; how many of these will thereby miss out on cancer screening; and how many of those who miss out on such screenings (like mammograms and colonoscopies) will therefore experience advanced cancer.

The bottom line? Over the next two years:

7.5 million people will lose Medicaid coverage

400,000 will miss out on mammograms

675,000 will forgo colon cancer screening

70,000 will miss out on lung cancer screenings

The result will be avoidable advanced illnesses, with a couple thousand people, just over the next two years, developing advanced cancer because their tumors were not detected at an earlier stage. This is a problem likely to get significantly worse over time, because most of these cancers are slow-growing, and therefore the damage of not screening now will show up even more dramatically in 5 or 10 years.

Abstract, budget-crunchy policies have real human impact. Over the next two years, a couple thousand people will get the worst news of their lives – that they have advanced, incurable cancer. That number will continue to grow, as hundreds of thousands of missed tests allow more early-stage cancers to progress.

That’s the real, human cost of cutting Medicaid spending.