Op-ed by Alaska legislators decries likely effect of "Big Beautiful Bill, "especially in rural areas

Bryce Edgmon and Cathy Giessel of the Alaska legislature have published an op-ed in today's New York Times, "Our State Cannot Survive this Bill:"  One of the legislators is a Republican and the other an Independent, and they focus on their bipartisanship.  In some ways, this piece echoes analysis we are seeing about how many "red states" will suffer particularly under Trump's "big beautiful bill," but it also features some Alaska specifics.

Here's the lede: 

Across the country, state lawmakers like us are bracing as the federal government considers a bill that will throw state budgets into chaos and add red tape that our social service agencies do not have the capacity to administer. If the budget reconciliation bill passes Congress in anything like its current form, we will be left to deal with the fallout.

The likely impacts from the “big, beautiful bill” are particularly ugly for our home state, Alaska: Nearly 40,000 Alaskans could lose health care coverage, thousands of families will go hungry through loss of benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and the shift in costs from the federal government to the state will plunge our budget into a severe deficit, cripple our state economy and make it harder to provide basic services.

And in these paragraphs, the writers get around to the rural angle: 

The benefits of Medicaid and the SNAP program permeate the entire fabric of the Alaska economy, with one in three Alaskans receiving Medicaid, including more than half of the children. In remote Arctic communities, Medicaid dollars make medical travel possible for residents from the hundreds of roadless villages to the communities where they are able to receive proper medical treatments.

We fear that if this bill passes, a village in rural Alaska might lose its one and only grocery store because of a drastic decline in SNAP dollars. It might also lose its sole health care clinic or hospital because it cannot sustain its services with decreased Medicaid reimbursements. The reconciliation bill does not take into account the uniqueness of Alaskan lifestyles and geographic remoteness.

The legislators explain that the federal cuts will cause costs for many services to be shifted to the state budget, which will cause great strain.  It also takes up the fact that work requirements for public benefits are an ill fit for rural Americans.

Alaska cannot afford to lose health care funding. Our state is near the top of the list for the highest rates of suicide, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted infections in the nation. It is also severely lacking in adequate behavioral health services. The cuts will only make these problems worse.

Work requirements instituted in Medicaid are untenable for rural Alaska, with many communities facing limited broadband access and job opportunities.

Here's a piece in The Atlantic, by Russell Berman, suggesting that Kentucky Republicans are not afraid to stand up to Trump.