Stephanie Grace: Lawmakers say don’t cut Medicaid. The state’s members of Congress should listen.

The Louisiana Legislature just got through passing a whole bunch of laws, but few if any will affect the state’s financial health — and that of many of its residents — as much as what’s happening in Congress right now.

And on that, lawmakers had a clear message for Washington: Don’t cut Medicaid.

I’m not talking about just members of the Democratic minority, or even a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans. No, resolutions urging Congress to preserve funding for the widely used program passed overwhelmingly in both houses in Baton Rouge, each stocked with a supermajority of Republicans.

If that doesn’t convey the urgency of the threat, the names of the lawmakers who wrote the resolutions should. House Resolution 369, which asks Congress not to take action on Medicaid that adversely affects hospitals, was authored by state Rep. Jack McFarland, R-Jonesboro, who chairs the Appropriations Committee that deals with the state budget; it passed 98-0. Senate Concurrent Resolution 32 from state Sen. Patrick McMath, R-Covington, chair of the Health and Welfare Committee, asks Congress to oppose “sweeping or indiscriminate cuts” to Medicaid. It passed the Senate 35-0 and the House 84-7.

Or maybe this might: Senate President Cameron Henry, R-Metairie, is lobbying his contacts in Congress to hold the line. If the deep cuts proposed in the Senate Finance Committee version of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act become reality and take effect immediately, the Legislature would likely have to go into special session to deal with the fallout, Henry said at a post-legislative panel hosted by the Public Affairs Research Council.

The proposed Senate language has “a bunch of things in it that would have significant effects on Louisiana, not in a positive way,” Henry said. These effects could impact many of the roughly 1.8 million people in Louisiana who are covered by various Medicaid programs, and also all of those who seek care at rural hospitals that rely on Medicaid funding to keep their doors open. Among many other things, the bill would cut into the “provider taxes” that states use to draw down federal match money.

In an ideal world, Henry’s pleas would spur action from the Congressional delegation’s Republicans — who, after all, were elected to represent the same constituents as all those GOP representatives and senators who are asking for relief.

Yet the pull of national politics may be too strong.

On the Senate side, Louisiana should get a sympathetic ear from U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, chair of the committee that oversees health care, member of the Finance Committee and a physician who long treated Louisiana’s neediest patients in the old Charity Hospital system. Cassidy has an admirable history of putting the state’s needs first, most notably when he crossed party lines to work on the giant infrastructure package passed under former President Joe Biden, which at the senator’s behest was written to focus on some of Louisiana’s specific challenges.

Yet he is depressingly compromised by his own political situation — specifically a reelection campaign next year in which he’s been targeted by MAGA forces still angry that he voted to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial — so much so that he pushed through Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation despite deep, entirely justified misgivings and is going out of his way to voice enthusiasm for the president’s giant spending bill.

Then there are two top-ranking members on the House side, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Benton, and Henry’s former boss Steve Scalise, R-Metairie, the majority leader. Certainly the two of them should be in a position to understand how much the cuts, even under the House-passed bill, would hurt their state. Like Cassidy, they both did time in the Louisiana Legislature, so the stakes are hardly unfamiliar.

Yet here’s how Henry characterized their response: “They’re aware of it, but they are also aware that the rest of the country wants changes.”

Well, OK, but Trump didn’t talk about making these particular changes on the campaign trail. And it’s not like the people these Louisiana members represent didn’t vote like the rest of the country. They did, giving Trump an easy 60% majority in Louisiana, compared to his just-under-50% winning plurality nationwide. The legislative resolutions asking for help came from lawmakers sent to Baton Rouge by those same people.

So I don’t know, maybe Cassidy, Johnson, Scalise and the rest might want to dig a little deeper and consider joining state legislators in doing what’s best for their own constituents — not just a president who demands, and somehow seems to get, their fealty at every turn.