RICHMOND, VA — Governor Abigail Spanberger continues to meet with community advocates and healthcare professionals, providers, and patients from across the Commonwealth to prepare Virginia for the impacts to healthcare and SNAP imposed by H.R.1 — President Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill.

New reporting by the Richmond Times-Dispatch highlights Governor Spanberger’s roundtable last week with community-based organization and other key stakeholders to discuss the law’s effects on the most vulnerable Virginians — and the steps the Spanberger Administration is taking to protect Virginians from the worst impacts of the cuts. The Governor previously met with key stakeholders representing health plans, hospitals, and providers to discuss how the federal cuts will impact their ability to care for patients.

Virginia’s biennium 2026-2028 state budget contains nearly $1 billion in investments focused on protecting healthcare access for Virginians — including $350 million for the Medicaid Reserve Fund to protect healthcare coverage for the hundreds of thousands of Virginians who rely on the program. Governor Spanberger and the General Assembly have also set aside $150 million to help 200,000 Virginians who are the most at risk of losing their coverage through the Marketplace created by the Affordable Care Act.

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Richmond Times-Dispatch: Impact of One Big Bill 'monumentally worse' than expected, Spanberger says

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“The impacts of HR1 (the One Big Bill), particularly after the rules pushed out by CMS, will be monumentally worse than even what was anticipated last year when we were reviewing the legislation,” Gov. Abigail Spanberger told the roundtable.

“The entire way that they were able to make the numbers work is by creating a bill by which people will be pushed off of social safety net programs, principally in Medicaid, (and) by reducing dollars for hospital systems via the changes to the provider tax, and we know that it will be billions, billions of dollars out of Virginia’s healthcare system,” Spanberger said.

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Meanwhile, federal funding cuts to state programs that pay for safety net hospital care take effect in 2028 — a $1.2 billion hit for Virginia hospitals, according to a RAND study that Figueroa highlighted for the roundtable.

“I’ll say this out loud: when we came into office, it was as if HR 1 didn’t exist. There was no plan. There was no governance structure,” Figueroa said.

“For the last seven months, our work has been setting up the governance structure, looking at the systems that need to change, making the projections on the numbers and the impact on the underlying budget, and modify the budget,” Figueroa said.

“It was just things that were unrealistic, and so we’ve also been working on work requirements to make sure that we had the systems in place. And then came June, and the administration went in a completely different direction than we thought they were going to go,” he said.

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