Growing concerns in Louisiana over potential Medicaid, Medicare cuts

BATON ROUGE, La. (Louisiana First) — With federal lawmakers weighing cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, health care leaders in Louisiana are sounding the alarm, warning that reductions in funding could devastate access to care for hundreds of thousands of residents.

“We have serious concerns about not only the impact on patients in our community health centers, but the impacts in our state,” said Raegan A. Carter, director of health policy and governmental affairs at the Louisiana Primary Care Association (LPCA).

Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), which provide care regardless of a patient’s ability to pay, are at the heart of that concern. Carter said 60% of the roughly 503,000 patients seen at Louisiana’s FQHCs rely on Medicaid for coverage.

“These are individuals who often don’t have access to health care, whether because a provider isn’t nearby or because they don’t have Medicaid or health insurance,” Carter said. “If these cuts go through, the effects will be felt far and wide.”

One-third of Louisiana’s population relies on Medicaid, a fact Carter emphasized in explaining the human toll potential cuts could bring.

“That could be your neighbor, someone in your family, someone at your church, someone on your job, someone you met just today,” she said.

Cuts to funding would not only impact individual patients, Carter warned, but also the infrastructure of health care in the state. She pointed to critical services like transportation, remote patient monitoring, and in-house pharmacies that could be lost if clinics are forced to scale back or shut down.

“If federal funding drops, our state simply can’t fill the gap,” Carter said. “Hospitals will close, clinics will close, and people will die. That is something that I just cannot imagine we will be facing in our state today. But it is an unfortunate reality.”

Though the full outcome remains uncertain, Carter is encouraging Louisianans to get involved. She urged concerned citizens to contact state and federal lawmakers and advocate for continued support of the programs that underpin care for so many.

“We need them to think about Louisiana, to think about our patients, and the care they depend on when they’re making decisions in Washington,” she said.

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