Congressman Jimmy Panetta, from California’s 19th district including Monterey County, hosted a Medicaid town hall Friday, joined by a panel of physicians and health care providers who shared their views on the consequences of the House Republicans’ blueprint proposal that would require cuts to Medicaid.

Panetta spoke out against the budget resolution in which the House Energy and Commerce Committee would have to cut at least $880 billion from its annual budget. Based on that committee’s authority and overall budget, that amount could lead to severe cuts in Medicaid, ACA premium assistance and health care programs for working families. In our congressional district, such cuts could negatively impact the healthcare for nearly 165,000, including 50,000 children and 26,000 seniors.

“We can’t allow this administration to use the excuse of getting rid of fraud to take a sledgehammer to absolutely blow up agencies,” Panetta said. “We can’t allow this President and Elon Musk to basically cut out services that all of us rely on.”

The town hall served as an opportunity for Panetta to share his reasoning for pursuing litigation against the Trump Administration and bring a panel of experts to discuss how cuts to Medicaid and MediCal could affect Monterey County residents.

The congressman said he would stand up against both Republicans and Democrats who went against their constituents best interests, by pursuing dozens of legislative actions.

“I will work with them (Republicans), but if they go against their districts in order to support the administration, then they need to be held accountable by their constituency,” Panetta said.

The panel — Donaldo Hernandez, former president of the California Medical Association, Ananta Addala, from Stanford University and Chad Harris the CEO of Natividad Hospital — took turns explaining why an end or pause to Medicaid could be detrimental to their respective practices, then answered questions from the public.

“In Monterey County, 203,000 people are on Medi-Cal, that’s 47% of the population of the county,” Hernandez said. “Every county voted in favor of Prop 35, the largest increase in the Medi-Cal fee schedule in the history of the program since 1965, so Medi-Cal is important to California, and in fact, 67% of all Californians voted in favor of Prop 35 because they understood the value of that.”

Hernandez said more than half of the state’s residents use some kind of government insurance for health care, and cuts to the program could be devastating.

“The largest insurance group in the state of California right now are governmental based insurances. Fifty percent of children are on Medicaid. Forty percent of all women in the state are Medicaid,” Hernandez said. “That’s a population that none of us are willing to walk away from, the economically disadvantaged and historically economically disadvantaged really need to have that voice.”