APEX SPECIAL EVENT
On July 4, 2025, President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) into law. Alongside other major changes to federal fiscal landscape, the law will result in the largest cuts to Medicaid spending in the program’s history, totaling nearly $1 trillion over the next ten years and leading to substantial increases in the number of Americans without health insurance. In this conversation with Jamila Michener and Miranda Yaver (moderated by Jacob Hacker), we discuss the politics leading up to the OBBBA’s passage, its major effects on U.S. health policy, and what these changes mean for the American healthcare landscape and politics of safety net programs over the years to come.
PLEASE RSVP AT THIS LINK TO RESERVE LUNCH
If you would like to arrange a meeting with our guest speakers, please contact Patrick Sullivan.
Jamila Michener is a professor of Government and Public Policy at Cornell University, and the inaugural director of the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures. She studies poverty, racism, and public policy, with a particular focus on health and housing. She is author of Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics (Cambridge University Press) and Uncivil Democracy: How Access to Justice Shapes Political Power (Princeton University Press). She is co-editor of Politics in the American States: A Comparative Analysis (Sage Publications).
Miranda Yaver is a political scientist and assistant professor of Health Policy and Management at the University of Pittsburgh, where she holds secondary appointments in Political Science and Public and International Affairs. She was the 2025 Author-in-Residence and Healthcare Fellow at The Roosevelt Institute, co-leads the Scholars Strategy Network Medicaid Working Group as well as the Central PA SSN chapter, and is in the inaugural cohort of the Academy Health Champions for Health Services and Prevention. Her research examines administrative burdens and inequities in health care access, the politics of health reform, and health insurance barriers more broadly. Her forthcoming book Coverage Denied: How Health Insurers Drive Inequality in the United States, is being released by Cambridge University Press in April 2026, and examines the ways that the tools of privatization impose health insurance barriers that drive administrative burdens and inequities.
This event is being sponsored by the American Political Economy eXchange (APEX) program at ISPS.