SARANAC LAKE — About a third of the North Country’s population is enrolled in Medicaid, a federally subsidized health care program. President Donald Trump wants to slash Medicaid funding and limit who’s eligible for the program.
U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand visited Adirondack Medical Center in Saranac Lake on Monday to push back against the proposed cuts, which are part of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the bill would reduce Medicaid spending by about $793 billion.
“This Big Beautiful Bill is not a big beautiful bill, it is a big beautiful betrayal,” Gillibrand said on Monday.
Adirondack Medical Center is the largest hospital in the park and the region’s biggest private employer. Gillibrand warned that Medicaid cuts would destabilize healthcare around the region, hurting both providers and patients.
“Here in the North Country, the numbers are very troubling,” Gillibrand said. “Over 2,600 jobs could be eliminated right here in this congressional district, while about 44,000 people would lose their health insurance and 19,000 people would lose access to nutrition benefits under the SNAP program.”
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, helps more than 40 million Americans buy groceries. The program faces a cut of nearly $300 million in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. The legislation, which is over 1,000 pages long, passed the House in late May by a one-vote margin.
North Country Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik said she was “proud to be the deciding vote to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill, a historic victory for New Yorkers and President Trump’s America First agenda.”
Stefanik has said the changes to Medicaid would “strengthen and secure” the program by preventing ineligible people from enrolling.
“There’s no evidence to support [Stefanik’s] statements,” Gillibrand said on Monday. “We don’t have a scourge of Medicaid fraud in this country. We have a lot of low-income families who can’t afford healthcare.”
In the Adirondacks, many families access healthcare through the Hudson Headwaters Health Network. That network of small clinics receives federal subsidies to serve lower-income regions that are considered medically underserved.
Tucker Slingerland, the CEO of Hudson Headwaters, met with Gillibrand on Monday and said one of the biggest impacts of cutting Medicaid is forcing people to rethink their healthcare because of the cost.
“When you call the ambulance, you don’t want to be thinking about the bill. When you see your provider for routine health care that prevents problems down the road, you do not want to think about the expense, because when people do that, they tend to forgo care,” Slingerland said.
When people forgo care, one minor medical problem could turn into a major, life-threatening one.
The Senate is currently working on its version of the Big Beautiful Bill. It’s expected to vote on the legislation in the next week or two.