WASHINGTON — Without a single vote to spare, the U.S. House passed a mega-bill early Thursday that’s chock-full of Republican priorities.
Alaska Congressman Nick Begich, like nearly all Republicans, voted for it.
“This is a great bill for Alaska,” he said in his Washington, D.C. office, a few hours after the vote. “It preserves the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, so it keeps taxes low for working Americans, working Alaskans. It also drives some accountability in some of the government programs that are safety-net programs.”
As he spoke, protesters in Alaska were preparing to bring a hospital bed covered in funeral flowers to his Anchorage office as a “symbol of public grief.” They and other critics say the bill is devastating for the social safety net.
Nationally, the bill cuts almost $100 billion a year from Medicaid, a public health insurance program, and SNAP, sometimes called food stamps. Instead, it shifts some of the costs to the states.
If it becomes law, the reconciliation bill would, for the first time, require states to pay a percentage of SNAP benefits, based on each state’s rate of payment error.
That would hit particularly hard in Alaska, which has the highest error rate in the country, stemming from a huge backlog in cases it struggled to clear. Alaska could be on the hook for 25% of SNAP benefits, or $63 million. Also, the bill would cut in half the amount the federal government pays the states to administer SNAP, a loss of nearly $6 million for Alaska.
“We're struggling right now, and this would just be a bigger hit,” said Rep. Genevieve Mina, D-Anchorage, who chairs the state House Committee on Health and Social Services. “I still receive constituent emails, and emails from people in other districts, that they've been waiting months for their Medicaid and for their SNAP. So it's this cascading impact.”
About one in 10 Alaskans receive SNAP benefits to help them buy food. The program injects some $250 million a year into Alaska’s economy, through grocery purchases.
Begich said he supports measures to ensure Alaska and other states abide by the rules of the safety-net program. Alaska’s cost share of SNAP could drop from 25% to 5% if it improves its error rate, he said, and it has a year to work on that.
“A number of other states have gotten it right, and I think that we need to look to other states for how we go about ensuring that the people that are receiving the benefit are properly vetted,” he said.
State House Rep. Zack Fields, D-Anchorage, said there’s no quick way to fix the trouble Alaska has had administering the federal programs, which he attributes to job vacancies, low salaries and benefits.
“This is such a profound challenge,” Fields said. “It's absolutely not something we can solve by the time these proposed mandates and the budget reconciliation proposals would come down on us.”
The bill adds work requirements to Medicaid. Health researchers say requiring beneficiaries to document they work at least 80 hours a month could cause as many as 14,000 Alaskans to lose their health care coverage, even though many work already or would be exempt.
The bill includes a huge array of Republican priorities, such as more domestic energy production.
Begich lauded a section promoting oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, including a provision that says 90% of the revenue would go to the State of Alaska, starting in 2035. In addition to requiring more lease sales, Begich said it would provide regulatory certainty.
"We worked with many of the folks who would likely be bidders to ensure that they believe that they could bid high and robustly on these lease sales, so that we can get some production in these areas," he said.
In last-minute changes, House leaders removed two sections of the bill
aimed at encouraging development in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and construction of the Ambler road to aid mining.
The reconciliation bill goes next to the Senate, where it can pass with just Republican votes. But several Republicans have said they don’t like it
Sen. Lisa Murkowski has said she won’t vote for a bill that would make big cuts to health care coverage. She said a bill that does that indirectly, by requiring states to contribute more than they can, isn’t good either.
“If you shift these costs, and they are substantial enough, you will possibly, quite possibly, have the state in the position of then just dropping those individuals from the rolls," she said.
She said she was still studying the bill to see if Alaska can administer the safety-net programs with the new requirements.
