The Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday that millions of low-income people will lose health insurance and food stamps following changes to entitlement programs made under President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed last month.
The CBO, a nonpartisan organization that provides budget estimates for Congress, issued a distributional analysis of the loss of Medicaid benefits, Obamacare health insurance exchange coverage, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits due to changes to the programs from the GOP’s tax reform legislation.
The CBO analysis expects the bill’s long-term effects to be negative for the lowest income brackets, or those who earn less than $43,000 annually, excluding state and federal benefit programs.
Resources for those in the lowest income bracket will decrease by about $1,200 per year on average, compared to the CBO’s baseline projections from January.
By 2034, roughly 10 million people are estimated to lose Medicaid coverage, the program designed to provide health insurance coverage for low-income adults, children, and disabled Americans. That’s in addition to the roughly 25 million people in America who were uninsured in 2023, according to the left-leaning healthcare think tank KFF.
An additional 2.1 million Americans are expected to lose coverage under the Obamacare marketplace exchange health plans due to the expected expiration of premium tax credits at the end of the year. House Republicans are weighing options to extend the subsidies, possibly through another reconciliation bill process.
More than half of those slated to lose Medicaid coverage, about 5.3 million people, are estimated to lose Medicaid benefits due to the new work requirements in the law that now require nondisabled individuals to work or volunteer for 80 hours per month.
Work requirements for SNAP benefits are also slated to reduce food stamp participation by an average of 2.4 million people each month by 2034. As of last year, SNAP is the largest food security program, providing in-kind assistance to roughly 42 million people each month.
SNAP benefit reductions due to work requirements include roughly 800,000 nondisabled adults under 64 without dependent children, 300,000 nondisabled adults with children over age 14, and another 1 million nondisabled adults who would have been eligible for a waiver under the original work requirements rules.
The CBO’s report also estimated that the amount SNAP beneficiaries receive will likely fall from an average of $227 to only $213 per month.
CBO did not provide a total number of people expected to lose SNAP benefits because it was difficult to determine how eligibility changes would interact with benefit reductions.
The nonpartisan agency has received significant criticism in recent years from conservatives, who argue that its coverage loss estimates are often inflated.
But the CBO acknowledged in its Tuesday reports that its numbers are “subject to considerable uncertainty” in part because it is nearly impossible to predict how each of the 50 states will respond to federally mandated changes to these state-administered programs.
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The One Big Beautiful Bill Act prevents states from using healthcare provider taxes to increase their state Medicaid budgets, meaning states will have to get creative with other taxes and program benefits.
The law also increased the percentage that states need to pay in administrative costs for the SNAP program from 50% to 75%. States will have to pay an additional fraction of SNAP benefits costs, up to 15%, depending on their payment error rate.
