---
type: source
title: "RSC Pushes Second Reconciliation Bill January 2026 — More Medicaid Cuts and Site-Neutral Payments"
author: "Georgetown Center for Children and Families"
url: https://ccf.georgetown.edu/2026/01/22/house-republican-study-committee-pushes-for-second-budget-reconciliation-bill-and-more-damaging-medicaid-cuts/
date: 2026-01-22
domain: health
secondary_domains: []
format: policy analysis
status: processed
priority: medium
tags: [reconciliation, medicaid, site-neutral-payments, rsc, second-bill, fqhc, republican]
---

## Content

The House Republican Study Committee (RSC) unveiled a framework for a second budget reconciliation bill in January 2026, following the OBBBA enacted July 4, 2025.

**Key healthcare proposals in the second bill:**

**Medicaid coverage restrictions:**
- Eliminate Medicaid and CHIP eligibility for lawfully present immigrants (refugees, asylees, trafficking victims, domestic violence victims, humanitarian parolees)
- Would take effect October 1, 2026

**Payment reform:**
- Site-neutral hospital payments — would require Medicare and potentially Medicaid to pay the same rate for services regardless of where they're provided (hospital outpatient vs. physician office vs. FQHC)
- This specifically threatens FQHCs, which receive enhanced per-visit payment rates under current law
- FQHC payment rates are what fund CHW programs and integrated social services in community health centers

**Senate Byrd Rule constraints:**
- For Senate passage, provisions must have direct and more-than-incidental budgetary impact
- Drug pricing reforms, PBM policies, Medicaid payment changes are most likely to survive Byrd Rule
- Site-neutral payments are a significant budgetary provision and would likely survive

**Context:**
- This is IN ADDITION TO OBBBA, not instead of it
- The political trajectory is escalating cuts, not stabilizing
- RSC represents the most conservative House Republican faction — this is the direction the party is pushing

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** The second reconciliation bill adds a specific mechanism that directly threatens CHW programs: site-neutral payments. FQHCs are the primary institutional home for CHW programs in the US, receiving ~$300/visit vs. ~$100/visit in physician offices. Site-neutral would collapse this differential. The March 18 session identified FQHCs as critical to CHW scaling (43% of FQHC revenue comes from Medicaid). Site-neutral + OBBBA Medicaid cuts creates a compound threat to the only institutional channel that has scaled CHW programs.

**What surprised me:** The second bill is being pushed without waiting to see the implementation results of OBBBA. The policy acceleration suggests the healthcare cuts are ideological/fiscal, not evidence-based. The RSC framework doesn't engage with any of the health outcomes literature (Annals study: 16,000 preventable deaths) — the cuts are proceeding regardless.

**What I expected but didn't find:** Any VBC or prevention-oriented provisions in the RSC framework. There is nothing in the second bill that creates positive health incentives. It's entirely about cutting coverage and payments.

**KB connections:**
- Extends the OBBBA coverage loss story — the second bill adds site-neutral FQHC threat on top of Medicaid enrollment loss
- Directly threatens the CHW infrastructure that the March 18 session identified as most RCT-validated non-clinical intervention
- Connects to healthcare is a complex adaptive system requiring simple enabling rules — the opposite of what these cuts are doing

**Extraction hints:** The site-neutral FQHC threat is the specific extractable claim. Something like: "Republican site-neutral payment proposals would eliminate FQHCs' enhanced per-visit payment differential, removing the funding mechanism that makes community health worker programs economically viable within the institution that hosts most of them."

## Curator Notes
PRIMARY CONNECTION: [[SDOH interventions show strong ROI but adoption stalls because Z-code documentation remains below 3 percent and no operational infrastructure connects screening to action]]
WHY ARCHIVED: The second reconciliation bill adds a SECOND threat to SDOH/CHW infrastructure on top of OBBBA. Site-neutral payments specifically target FQHCs, which are the primary institutional channel for CHW programs. Together with provider tax freeze (OBBBA), this creates a compound threat to the payment infrastructure that CHW scaling requires.
EXTRACTION HINT: Extract as a compound claim: OBBBA (provider tax freeze) + second bill (site-neutral) = two-vector attack on CHW infrastructure. The extractor should show how these two mechanisms interact, not treat them as independent.
