The ISPS American Political Economy eXchange presents
Jamila Michener, associate professor, Department of Government, Cornell University and Miranda Yaver, assistant professor of Health Policy and Management, University of Pittsburgh:
“Medicaid in a Post-Big Beautiful Bill World.”
On July 4, 2025, President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) into law. Alongside other major changes to federal fiscal landscape, the law will result in the largest cuts to Medicaid spending in the program’s history, totaling nearly $1 trillion over the next ten years and leading to substantial increases in the number of Americans without health insurance. In this conversation with Jamila Michener and Miranda Yaver (moderated by Jacob Hacker), we discuss the politics leading up to the OBBBA’s passage, its major effects on U.S. health policy, and what these changes mean for the American healthcare landscape and politics of safety net programs over the years to come. Lunch will be served.
Jamila Michener’s research focuses on poverty, racial inequality and public policy in the United States. Her recent book, Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism and Unequal Politics (Cambridge University Press) examines how Medicaid–the nation’s public health insurance program for people with low income–affects democratic citizenship. Unpacking how federalism transforms Medicaid beneficiaries’ interpretations of government and structures their participation in politics, Fragmented Democracy assesses American political life from the vantage point(s) of those who are living in or near poverty, (disproportionately) Black or Latino, and reliant on a federated government for vital resources.
Miranda Yaver holds secondary appointments in Political Science and Public and International Affairs. She was the 2025 Author-in-Residence and Healthcare Fellow at The Roosevelt Institute, co-leads the Scholars Strategy Network Medicaid Working Group as well as the Central PA SSN chapter, and is in the inaugural cohort of the Academy Health Champions for Health Services and Prevention. Her research examines administrative burdens and inequities in health care access, the politics of health reform, and health insurance barriers more broadly. Her forthcoming book Coverage Denied: How Health Insurers Drive Inequality in the United States, is being released by Cambridge University Press in April 2026, and examines the ways that the tools of privatization impose health insurance barriers that drive administrative burdens and inequities.