What’s the Impact of Reducing Medicaid Hospital Taxes?

Abstract

The Hilltop Institute has released updated analysis of the Medicaid provider tax provisions of the Senate budget reconciliation bill. The estimates, which model the version of the bill released from the Senate Finance committee on June 16, 2025, update Hilltop’s earlier analysis of provider taxes. Authored by Hilltop Director of Analytics and Research Dr. Morgan Henderson, Senior Data Scientist Dr. Leigh Goetschius, and Executive Director Alice Middleton, this analysis uses hospital provider tax rates and net patient revenue data to calculate the estimated state-level impacts of the proposed Senate legislation. The authors find that, once the provider tax reductions are fully implemented as of 2031, this legislation would reduce federal funding to 18 Medicaid expansion states by over $11.9 billion annually. Moreover, the impact will not be uniform: the impact will be largest in states with high hospital provider tax rates. Specifically, the authors find that Arizona, New Hampshire, Nevada, Iowa, Vermont, and Michigan would each at lose least 7.5% of their federal Medicaid funding as a result of this bill.While the proposed legislation proposes a suite of Medicaid policy changes that would interact in various ways, this analysis only considers the hospital provider tax change in isolation. This is the latest in a series of Hilltop analyses focused on modeling state-level impacts of potential federal Medicaid policy changes.