After the U.S. Senate voted to pass President Donald Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" on July 1, 2025, rumors circulated that the amended bill would result in 17 million people losing access to health care. This was due to projected cuts to Medicaid provided for in the bill.
For example, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, posted the claim on X (archived):
As of this writing, the post had garnered 3.2 million views and 85,000 likes. Other posts on X and Facebook also spread the claim, including one by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts.
The bill, which could still be amended, provided for about $1 trillion in funding cuts for Medicaid, according to a June 30 note by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities based on data from the Congressional Budget Office.
Medicaid had more than 78 million enrollees as of March 2025.
In a June 16 letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, and Democratic Reps. Frank Pallone and Richard Neal, of New Jersey and Massachusetts, respectively, the CBO estimated that the budget bill as it stood would result in 16 million people becoming uninsured by 2034. This number included 10.9 million people losing Medicaid coverage access to health insurance through the Affordable Care Act of 2010, also known as Obamacare, because of the bill.
After the bill was amended in the Senate, the CBO estimated it would result in 11.8 million people losing Medicaid and ACA coverage. This led KFF — a nonprofit organization focused on health policy — to estimate that 17 million people would lose access to health insurance by 2034.
The Democrats of the Joint Economic Committee also created an estimate based on CBO data, breaking down numbers by state and asserting that 17 million people across the U.S. would lose their health insurance by 2034 due to the budget bill and other policies of the Trump administration.
Though the bill ultimately passed the House without changes on July 3, 2025, and Trump signed it into law the following day, it is important to note that these were estimates. The number of people who will lose insurance in the U.S. as a result of this bill and other Trump administration policies will become clearer starting in 2026.