‘The Pitt’ season 2 to address consequences of Trump’s Medicaid cuts

Season 1 of The Pitt wasn’t afraid to show the harsh realities of what goes down in the chaotic world of ER medical professionals and its upcoming installment plans to do the same.

Star and producer Noah Wyle and executive producers John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill outlined how season 2 of the HBO Max medical drama will incorporate President Donald Trump’s controversial policy changes introduced in the so-called “big, beautiful bill,” in a new interview with Variety.

“You don’t have to take a political position to discuss what the impact [of the Medicaid changes] is actually going to be,” Wells said. “They’re going to have on-the-ground, immediate consequences in emergency rooms, and nobody’s arguing with that. That’s a bipartisan agreement. You’ve got very Republican senators from Missouri like Josh Hawley agreeing that this is going to be a problem.”

Trump signed the bill in question into law on July 4. The legislation extends the president’s 2017 tax cuts and increases defense and border wall funds, while also including $930 billion in cuts to Medicaid, and other cuts to food assistance, clean energy programs, and student loans.

“We have a certain safety net in just being a realistic drama by trying to depict what it looks like in a hospital,” Wyle told the outlet of the show’s tendency to show multiple sides of an argument. “You’re not making value judgments. You’re just painting a picture, and if it’s accurate enough and it’s representative enough, it becomes a bit of a Rorschach test. You see what you want to see in it and you draw your own conclusions from it. If it looks like the system is untenable, unfair and skewed towards one population over another, maybe it is.”

Viewers can expect the series to address real-life concerns about patient care, including the treatment of patients of color and undocumented and immigrant families amid the recent ICE raids as the show grapples with issues that stem from policies that went into effect this year.

“We take our platform very seriously,” Gemmill said. “I think one of the things when you can reach 10 million people — and this was true back in the day on ER as well — is with that amount of people listening, you have to be responsible for what you put out there.”

Wells added, “We have a lot of people to call on to ask what’s likely to happen.”

As Gemmill pointed out, “When people have less finances from the government to help them with their healthcare, they’re going to get less healthcare, and that means they’re going to end up in the only place where they can get free healthcare, which is the ER. So the ER is just going to get busier and busier and become more of a safety net, and it’s already broken, so the system is destined for a tipping point.”

But it isn’t just new policy changes that the Pitt is looking to tackle. Wyle shared that several storylines on the show will also address age-old issues that have plagued the medical industry since its inception. Namely the systematic and sometimes unconscious bias in healthcare that affect the quality of healthcare received by marginalized communities.

Wells told Variety that he’s hopeful that medical professionals will “both see themselves in The Pitt but privately question, and rectify, their own unconscious bias about patients from marginalized groups.”

The Pitt was renewed for a second season in February, with Warner Bros. Television declaring it as the streamer’s most-watched title globally. Season 2 is expected to arrive in January 2026, Max CEO Casey Bloys told Vulture earlier this year.

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Wells previously confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that, like season 1, next season will unfold across another 15-hour workday.

“It is going to be a single shift,” he said. “The intent here is to let us follow and understand and feel what happens to emergency room physicians and all the other medical personnel during those kinds of shifts. We’ll get senses of what their lives are outside and we’ll get information based on what’s happened in their lives outside, but within the workplace.”

He continued, “It’s a workplace family, and that’s where we’re going to learn about our characters. They come to work and they clock in and they stay until they’re done. So this isn’t a show that’s going to end up following a lot of people home and seeing them for Thanksgiving dinner.”

The Pitt season 2 began filming in June. Season 1 is currently streaming on HBO Max.