MADISON, Wis. — New reporting from the Wisconsin Examiner highlighted some of the Wisconsin families who will be hurt the most by Republican-led cuts to Medicaid and SNAP benefits. Today, Derrick Van Orden cast the deciding vote to decimate these programs, of which over 150,000 of his constituents rely on Medicaid while over 30,000 rely on snap for their health care and food security, respectively. The bill will further reward billionaires with an even bigger tax cut.
Wisconsin Examiner: Two Parents Put A Face On The Impact Of Potential Medicaid Cuts
By: Erik Gunn
As members of Congress continue to debate the Republican budget reconciliation bill that includes hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid, Jessica Seawright ponders what that could mean for her young son.
Seawright is a social worker in Southeast Wisconsin. She’s also the mother of a 9-year-old boy with complex medical needs resulting from a genetic condition.
She and her husband — a college professor — have medical coverage through work, but with her son’s condition, which includes cerebral palsy, their health plans could never cover the degree of care he requires.
Medicaid has made the difference, Seawright said Wednesday. It’s helped through the Katie Beckett program, which enables children with disabilities to have Medicaid coverage while living at home instead of being in an institution; the Medicaid children’s long-term support coverage; and Medicaid support that public schools receive to cover certain services that students with disabilities require.
Her son has been able to thrive living with her and her husband, Seawright said — but worry clouds the future.
“We look toward his adulthood, knowing that disability and aging programs that would support him staying in the community — where we, our family and our community, know he belongs — are being dismantled and defunded,” Seawright said. “Forcing us and others like us into medical bankruptcy is not a solution.”
Seawright was one of two parents who said Wednesday that their lives and their children’s lives could be profoundly upended by the Medicaid reductions that are included in the budget reconciliation proposal.
They spoke during a webinar conducted by Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin), who has been an outspoken critic of the budget bill’s Medicaid cuts.
“Our neighbors, our friends and our colleagues at work who rely on Medicaid and are scared, really scared,” Baldwin said. She cited estimates produced by Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee that with cuts to Medicaid as well as to the Affordable Care Act, the legislation could reduce health care for nearly 14 million Americans, including almost 230,000 Wisconsin residents.
The money saved, she added, would be used to extend and expand tax cuts enacted in 2017, during the first Trump administration. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has said the tax cuts primarily favor the wealthy and corporations.
“It’s giveaways for their wealthy friends at the cost of Americans’ health and lives,” Baldwin said. “That’s the deal.”
Baldwin said the choice that U.S. House Republicans made to advance the bill in committee in the early hours of Wednesday morning was a sign that “Republicans know what they’re doing is deeply unpopular.”
She dismissed claims that the objective of the bill’s authors was to address waste, fraud or abuse in Medicaid and other safety net programs.
“I would be happy to come to the table to write a bill that truly gets at fraud and abuse,” Baldwin said. “We want that out of Medicaid. We want that out of Medicare. But that is not what this bill does. This bill terminates health care for Wisconsin families.”
Besides being a mother of a child who has been helped by Medicaid’s programs, Seawright has experienced Medicaid through two other lenses.
When she and her sister were growing up, their mother was relying on Medicaid for the family’s health care. That helped give the family stability so that her mom could go to community college, become a medical assistant and get full-time work in health care with insurance through her employer, Seawright said.
In her own job as a social worker, she added, some of the clients she works with have Medicaid.
Both her childhood experience and her role as a mental health provider have made her critical of proposals to cut Medicaid, Seawright said — especially one to add work requirements as a condition for adults considered “able-bodied” to enroll in Medicaid.
“Creating more barriers for people to access the care they need … individuals losing their primary care providers and their specialists, from my perspective, is just a cruel response that is steeped in distrust of those of us who are doing the work day to day,” Seawright said.
Also on the webinar was Brooke Wampole, who lives in northern Wisconsin. She and her husband have a 4-year-old son who was found to have long delays in his development.
About two years ago he was screened and qualified for services and therapies covered by Medicaid programs for children with disabilities, and over time, his clinicians helped him first to “exist, to self-regulate, to see the world around him and not find it to be a threat,” Wampole said.
The family’s regular health insurance “could never cover the cost” those treatments required. “ Medicaid programs “have been absolutely instrumental in our lives.”
In the last year, her son has begun speaking one-syllable words. “My favorites or Mommy and Dada,” Wampole said, then added with a smile, “however, he is pretty partial to talking about trapezoids. And raisins.”
The thought of losing Medicaid coverage “is terrifying,” Wampole said — both because of the loss of services for her son, but also because of its impact on other families.
“I worry what our world looks like without Medicaid,” Wampole said. “Other families, they could be way worse off … and cutting Medicaid could hurt them even more than my family. I don’t want to be part of a system that contributes to that.”
