As Republican legislative leaders in Montana girded for 2025’s battle over whether to extend Medicaid expansion in the state, they took aim at one of the program’s biggest backers: hospitals. But instead, they found out just how formidable a political force the state’s hospitals can be. The hospitals not only helped steamroll Medicaid expansion through the Legislature, but they also defeated nearly all attempts to add new requirements to the program and to place new regulations on hospitals themselves.
