Investigators at Harvard Medical School Detail Findings in Managed Care (What Happens When Coverage Is Cut? Looking Backward and Forward From the One Big Beautiful Bill): Managed Care

2026 MAY 22 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Fresh data on Managed Care are presented in a new report. According to news reporting out of Boston, Massachusetts, by NewsRx editors, research stated, “The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law by President Trump on July 4, 2025 will cut $1 trillion from federal health care programs over the coming decade and cause 10 million individuals to become uninsured according to the Congressional Budget Office. Most analyses of the bill’s impacts have assumed they would be the inverse of those documented from previous coverage expansions.”

Financial support for this research came from NA.

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from Harvard Medical School, “An examination of past coverage cuts might yield additional insights into the probable impacts of this legislation on the medical care and health of the needy. We reviewed studies of four prior large scale coverage contractions: Reagan-era Medicaid cuts, the 2005 Tenncare Disenrollment, the 2019 implementation of work requirements in Arkansas, and the postpandemic ‘Unwinding’ of Medicaid. The experience of these prior coverage contractions complements evidence from analyses of coverage expansions in predicting that widespread insurance loss will lead to a reduction in care utilization, an increase in household financial strain, and worsened physical and mental health for low-income individuals. These coverage contractions additionally suggest that most who lose Medicaid coverage will not find alternative coverage; that work requirements will impose burdensome administrative costs on states; that states are unlikely to offset reductions in federal Medicaid funding with internal funds; and that the second-order effects of coverage losses may, in some instances, be greater (in magnitude) than the benefits seen after coverage expansions. Cuts to federal health care programs will produce sharp contractions in public coverage that will worsen existing problems in US health care such as insurance churn, degrading care, and worsening health inequality.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “While states may take some steps to mitigate harmful impacts, better protection of the medically needy would require repeal of the legislation, while full protection would require universal, seamless coverage.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: What Happens When Coverage Is Cut? Looking Backward and Forward From the One Big Beautiful Bill. The Milbank Quarterly, 2026. The Milbank Quarterly can be contacted at: Wiley, 111 River St, Hoboken 07030-5774, NJ, USA.

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Adam Gaffney, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States. Additional authors for this research include Danny Mccormick, David Bor, David U. Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0009.70082. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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