The Pitt plans to portray the effects of Medicaid cuts in season 2

“The Medicaid changes are going to have a significant impact, and you don’t have to take a political position to discuss what the impact is actually going to be,” executive producer John Wells says of the reality in hospitals in a pre-Emmy interview with Variety. “I don’t want to have an argument about whether or not they’re appropriate, what Congress did or didn’t do. But 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.”

For his part, star and executive producer Noah Wyle points out that the hospital setting and the fact that the show is fictional allows them to depict multiple sides of the same argument. “We have a certain safety net in just being a realistic drama by trying to depict what it looks like in a hospital. 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,” he says. But some of those conclusions are (hopefully) more intuitively drawn than others: “If it looks like the system is untenable, unfair and skewed towards one population over another, maybe it is.” Can we all agree that the system is untenable, unfair, and skewed? Probably not, but at least The Pitt will try to get the skeptics to give it some thought.