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Senate Republicans on Monday released legislation that would cut Medicaid far more aggressively than would the House-passed bill to deliver President Trump’s domestic agenda, while also salvaging or slowing the elimination of some clean-energy tax credits, setting up a fight over their party’s marquee policy package. (Edmondson, Sanger-Katz, Romm and Plumer, 6/16)

Congressional Republicans are poised to expand an obscure tax credit that helps companies provide paid family leave for their workforces, with plans to make the rarely used provision permanent. Lawmakers authorized the credit, known as Section 45S, in 2017 as a two-year trial amid calls for paid family leave for working parents — a national standard in much of the world. It has been extended twice and covers as much as one-quarter of a full-time worker’s wages for six to 12 weeks after the birth of a child, or other qualifying family or medical event. It’s available for workers who earn less than $96,000 a year. (Weil, 6/17)

Key health care provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, especially the proposed Medicaid cuts and Affordable Care Act marketplace reforms, would lead to 16,642 preventable deaths every year if implemented, according to a new analysis published Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine. (Russo, 6/16)

As Republican senators consider President Donald Trump’s big bill that could slash federal spending and extend tax cuts, a new survey shows most U.S. adults don’t think the government is overspending on the programs the GOP has focused on cutting, like Medicaid and food stamps. Americans broadly support increasing or maintaining existing levels of funding for popular safety net programs, including Social Security and Medicare, according to the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. They’re more divided on spending around the military and border security, and most think the government is spending too much on foreign aid. (Sanders, 6/16)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: ‘MAGA’ Backers Like Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ — Until They Learn Of Health Consequences

Nearly two-thirds of adults oppose President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” approved in May by the House of Representatives, according to a �鶹Ů�� poll released Tuesday. And even Trump’s most ardent supporters like the legislation a lot less when they learn how it would cut federal spending on health programs, the poll shows. (Galewitz, 6/17)

The American Hospital Association (AHA) estimates that the passage of this legislation would result in a $50.4 billion reduction in federal Medicaid spending on rural hospitals over the next decade, as well as 1.8 million people in rural communities losing their Medicaid coverage. This scenario is especially troubling because rural hospitals are already experiencing severe financial challenges, the AHA noted in a report it released last week. It is often more expensive to deliver healthcare in rural areas because of smaller patient volumes and higher costs for attracting staff. (Adams, 6/16)

Gov. Jared Polis said Medicaid cuts in the Republican budget bill will throw hundreds of thousands of Coloradans off their health care, drive up costs for everyone and put providers like hospitals and community health at risk. “Many rural health care providers, hospitals won't be able to make it. We're going to lose rural providers with this,” Polis, a Democrat, told a small group of health care leaders at a roundtable discussion Monday about Medicaid at UCHealth Broomfield Hospital in Broomfield. “We're going to shift the cost of care onto everybody who buys insurance, gets insurance through their employer. We'll pay more, employers will pay more. Bad for business and bad for workers.” (Daley, 6/16)

A leading bipartisan mental health advocacy group launched a $1 million targeted TV and radio advertising campaign Monday, calling on senators to protect Medicaid. The Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act proposes implementing deep cuts to Medicaid and imposing new restrictions on the program’s beneficiaries, like work requirements and more eligibility checks. (O’Connell-Domenech, 6/16)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: The Price You Pay For An Obamacare Plan Could Surge Next Year

Josefina Muralles works a part-time overnight shift as a receptionist at a Miami Beach condominium so that during the day she can care for her three kids, her aging mother, and her brother, who is paralyzed. She helps her mother feed, bathe, and give medicine to her adult brother, Rodrigo Muralles, who has epilepsy and became disabled after contracting covid-19 in 2020. “He lives because we feed him and take care of his personal needs,” said Josefina Muralles, 41. “He doesn’t say, ‘I need this or that.’ He has forgotten everything.” (Chang, 6/17)