WASHINGTON (Reuters)

At least three US lawmakers said on Tuesday (January 28) that healthcare providers were blocked from the Medicaid payment portal after the Trump administration announced a federal funding pause, even as the White House said the programme was exempted.

White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said the White House was aware of the Medicaid programme’s online portal outage and said it would be back online soon. She said no payments had been affected.

Mandatory programs like the joint federal-state health insurance program for the poor and the SNAP food assistance program were excluded from the US funding pause, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget told lawmakers in a letter.

More than 70 million people are covered by Medicaid, which is jointly paid by the states and the federal government with each state running its own programme.

Federal Medicaid assistance is distributed on a daily basis in the form of grants to states and totalled US$618 billion in the fiscal year ended on September 30, 2024—roughly US$2.5 billion per business day.

In the first four days of Trump’s presidency, the Health and Human Services Department disbursed about US$8.3 billion in Medicaid grants, according to the Treasury Department’s daily statement.

Meanwhile, however, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden said doctors and hospitals in all 50 states could not access the payment portals, freezing access to healthcare.

“My staff has confirmed reports that Medicaid portals are down in all 50 states following last night’s federal funding freeze. This is a blatant attempt to rip away health insurance from millions of Americans overnight and will get people killed,” Wyden wrote on X.

Fellow democrat Senator Chris Murphy separately said providers in his state cannot get paid after the Medicaid payment system was turned off, adding in his post on X that “discussions (were) ongoing about whether services can continue.”