Tag Archives: One Big Beautiful Bill Act

Minnesota applies for $1B in rural health care funds to offset Medicaid cuts especially in rural MN

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I wrote about the $1 billion application earlier; MPR News takes a deeper look…

Minnesota has applied for a share of $50 billion in federal funding for rural health care that was approved by Congress as part of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The Minnesota Department of Health applied for $1 billion over five years. Its 62-page application lays out detailed plans for the funds, including fellowships aimed at getting more medical students training and working in rural areas, adding more telehealth opportunities and providing more preventative care screenings in local venues, such as schools, pharmacies and tribal clinics.

It is in reaction to losing funds in other places…

The Minnesota Hospital Association estimates that the state could lose $2.4 billion in federal health care funding in the first year alone, fiscal year 2028. The MHA also finds that 140,000 Minnesotans on Medicaid could lose their healthcare coverage while another 60,000 Minnesotans will likely drop their ACA health insurance because of the rising costs.

It sounds like the impact could be harder felt in rural Minnesota…

About 30 percent of Minnesotans live in rural areas of the state, where the health care system has been severely strained in recent years.

There’s a shortage of physicians, nurses and other medical professionals, and the number of rural medical clinics and hospitals closing is on the rise. The MDH wrote in its application for the Rural Health Transformation Program funding that 34 out of Minnesota’s 95 rural hospitals are financially distressed, which means they’ve had four or more years of negative operating margins in the past eight years. Just this year, Mayo Clinic Health System announced it was closing six rural clinics in southeast Minnesota.

According to the application, Minnesota’s rural residents on average must travel 64 minutes for medical-surgical care, whereas people in the state’s urban areas travel just 19 minutes on average for care.

Will the recent One Big Beautiful Bill Act leave low-income households choosing between food or broadband?

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The American Prospect published an article from Sean Gonsalves, from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative, demonstrating how cut in the recently passed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA) may leave low-income household having to decide on food versus broadband…

Last year, GOP leaders blocked bipartisan efforts to fund an extension of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which offered 23 million eligible households a $30-per-month voucher to help pay for internet service. As if letting the ACP die wasn’t a big enough blow, OBBBA not only increases the paperwork burden required to qualify for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, it completely removes internet service costs as an eligible deduction.

In the context of SNAP, the “deduction” refers to how an eligible household’s net income is calculated, which is then used to determine how much households are entitled to receive in SNAP benefits. A lower net income translates into a higher allocation of benefits. Section 10005 of the law prohibits “household internet costs (e.g., monthly subscriber fees)” from being used in the net income calculation. That means that families with internet access will have higher net incomes, and therefore get lower benefits.

“Fundamentally, the SNAP benefit calculation is about calculating what the household has available for food. That’s why rent and utilities are factored in,” explained Katie Bergh, senior policy analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ (CBPP) Food Assistance team.

Contrast this change to 2019, when the first Trump administration sought to establish federal “Standard Utility Allowances” across every state. At that time, internet service was considered to be an essential utility—and that was before the COVID lockdowns turned internet access for all into one of the most bipartisan goals in all of politics.

But under OBBBA, and contrary to common sense, internet access is no longer considered essential, at least not for SNAP beneficiaries, despite repeated campaign promises to “make America affordable again” and to bring prices down “starting on Day 1.”