The MeidasTouch Podcast
Meidas Health: Congressman Adam Smith on Healthcare Impacts from Shutdown
19 Oct 2025
Representative Adam Smith (WA-09) joins Meidas Health host Dr. Vin Gupta to discuss the immediate and real world impacts of the current government shutdown on healthcare access for American families. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
Midas Mighty, welcome to yet another episode of Midas Health. We've been doing a lot of these recently and bringing the nation's best healthcare leaders, legislators, biggest thinkers to help us really parse through what is noise from what's substantive to help keep you and your families safe.
I'm excited to have yet another leader in Congress, one of our nation's biggest leaders in the US Congress, Representative Adam Smith of the state of Washington, my home state. Join us to talk about the impact of the shutdown on your health care and what this means for your family when it comes to accessing needed medical services. Representative Adam Smith, thank you for joining Midas Health.
Well, thank you. And I appreciate the chance. Very important topic. Well, Adam, you know, you and I were talking before this episode and I wanted to give you the floor just to explain to our viewers, our listeners. what the real world impacts are of this shutdown immediately on healthcare benefits. And then over time, what are we really talking about here? What are the stakes?
Well, the budget fight, the shutdown fight has huge stakes. And it's really easy to sort of think of it in two buckets. One is the broader budget, the budget that that Trump and his Republican friends in Congress have put in place over the course of the last nine months, which, as Hakeem Jeffries says all the time, has been the most devastating budget to health care in our lifetime.
The cuts to Medicaid, the cuts to the Affordable Care Act. You want to broaden health care, the cuts to food assistance, which obviously impact the health of people across the country. This budget reflects a set of priorities that doesn't include health. It is going to put millions of more people off of health insurance. They won't have insurance and it'll drive up the cost for everybody else.
So and in place of that, they've done massive tax cuts primarily for the wealthy. They've done a massive increase in the budget for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, massive increase in the defense budget. all at the expense of health care for the American people. So you've got the budget.
And then the second piece of this, which I won't go too far into because it's not directly related to health care, is just the authoritarian way that Donald Trump has run the government. He has not spent the money as Congress has told him to spend it in a variety of different areas. And in some places, this has hurt health. The cuts that he has made to the CDC and the NIH are
The cuts that he has made to scientific research across the country, all unilaterally. And to my mind, illegally. The Constitution states clearly Congress has the power to appropriate money. The president has ignored that and made severe cuts, not to mention, of course, what Secretary Kennedy is doing to our vaccine standards by running the department, the DHS, the way he is running it.
So it has been devastating. And this shutdown fight is an effort to push back. Yes, number one, we want to fund the Affordable Care Act tax credits so that people can continue to afford insurance.
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