Recent federal proposals to cut Medicaid funding could reduce health care services and cause some of the 242,000 Central Coast patients to lose their CenCal Health insurance. 

The proposed Big Beautiful Bill Act could reduce Medicaid spending by $793 billion among other cuts toward financing $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, according to news reports.

Health care providers are warning that patients won’t be able to afford to get care, and rural hospitals serving low-income communities would be at risk of closing. 

CenCal Health administers Medi-Cal for Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

Marina Owen, chief executive officer of CenCal, which serves one in three Santa Barbara County residents, said that without insurance, patients would have to start putting off essential care. 

“When people lose insurance, we see that they skip or defer that needed care, and that results in more costly care in the emergency rooms, poor health outcomes and overall, it impacts the well-being of our community if individuals cannot get early access to screenings and their annual well visits,” Owen said.

If the bill passes, people eligible for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act would be required to report at least 80 hours of work, or volunteering, a month in order to keep their insurance. 

Owen said the work requirement could be harmful for students and people working at home taking care of their aging parents or special-needs children.

Hospitals could be faced with more expensive emergency room care because the bill would also reduce retroactive coverage. Without retroactive coverage, only some of the care a patient received after enrolling in Medi-Cal would be covered, Owen said. 

Dr. Randall Michel, chief medical officer at Lompoc Valley Medical Center, estimates that 25% of its clinic patients have CenCal insurance.

“I’m just afraid that if they go through a lot of these cuts, the most vulnerable people are the ones that are going to be hurt,” Michel said. “It’ll be a really sad day if that happens.”

Michel said they’re concerned about the potential impacts but they also don’t have enough information to plan ahead.

“The Senate’s arguing amongst itself, so we really don’t know the full impact of it,” Michel said. “We’re kind of planning for the worst and hoping for the best.”

During the past six years, Lompoc Valley Medical Center has added several new physicians and is working to build a new clinic. If the bill does go through, Michel said they would have to slow down the expansion.

“We’re trying to recruit a lot of people to fill the new building when it’s completed. We may have to slow that down as a cost saving,” Michel said. 

Last week, Rep. Salud Carbajal, D-Santa Barbara, hosted a press conference with local health care providers to talk about the impact the funding cuts would have for Central Coast patients. 

Jenna Tosh, president of Planned Parenthood California Central Coast, said the bill has a provision that would defund Planned Parenthood from the Medicaid program as soon as the bill is enacted. 

Tosh also said that more than 70% of its patients have MediCaid-funded health insurance. 

“This provision would revoke their trusted health care provider, and it would create a health care crisis in California,” Tosh said. “If this bill passes, our entire system of care will be threatened. Every Planned Parenthood health center in the state would be at risk of closing, and there is simply no other way that other health care providers could absorb the nearly 1 million patients that could lose access to care.”

The bill was passed by the House of Representatives on May 22 and next will be reviewed by the Senate.