17M people will lose health care under Trump's budget bill? What we know

As U.S. President Donald Trump signed his "Big Beautiful Bill" into law on July 4, 2025, rumors circulated that 17 million people would lose health care due to the legislation's cuts to Medicaid.

For example, House Democrats' X account posted a video of Rep. Laura Friedman, a Democrat from California, explaining what she believed the law would do (archived), like "[kick] 17 million off their health care."

This post had received 12,000 views as of this writing. The same claim appeared on Facebook, Reddit and X with prominent Democrats such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom (archived) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, spreading the rumor.

The new law 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 the budget bill that had just passed the House would result in 16 million people becoming uninsured by 2034. This number included 10.9 million people who would lose Medicaid coverage and others who would lose health coverage obtained through marketplaces set up by the Affordable Care Act of 2010, also known as Obamacare.

When the bill was later amended in the Senate, the CBO revised its estimates upward, saying 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 law and other Trump administration policies will become clearer starting in 2026.